The Haulover Bridge and the approaches to it are classic British colonialism. The bridge itself was built without the future in mind. I mean, the thing is so narrow. That’s bad enough. But the Haulover approaches were built without the future or the present in mind. Damn, you don’t have to be an engineer, just a driver, to know that the approaches to a bridge are supposed to be substantially wider than the flooring of the bridge itself. The Haulover’s approaches are so tight, a taste of Madonna, it’s a wonder there aren’t more accidents there.
My late uncle always told me that wherever he went, he could tell where America had been, and he liked it. The thinking of the United States is completely different from the cheap ass British attitude. Perhaps it is because the U.S. is such a large and expansive country when you compare it to the British Isles. But some of it for sure is just the compulsive miserliness of the British. America was thinking big in Panama and in Puerto Rico, countries to which my uncle had traveled, and their construction projects impressed him, as they did other British Hondurans.
We’ve lived for so long with these Corozal, Orange Walk, Belize, Cayo, Stann Creek and Toledo Districts that we just take them for granted. Second nature. But what purposes do these somewhat arbitrary demarcations of our nation into “districts” serve in the modern era of national sovereignty?
The British ruled an empire “on which the sun never set,” as it was picturesquely described. You can’t conquer a people unless you divide them. Put it another way. It is much easier to defeat a people if you can divide them. The British, for all intents and purposes, conquered the world, and they specialized in division for the purposes of conquest, and after that, administration.
My generation’s understanding of these six districts was pretty much ethnic. Corozal and Orange Walk were Mestizo, what we called “Spanish.” Belize was Creole. Cayo was a mixture. Stann Creek was Carib. Toledo we hardly knew, but we believed it was, again, a mixture.
The reality was, for example, that there was a fundamental difference between Corozal and Orange Walk, because Corozal was Santa Cruz Maya (the bravos) in the villages, whereas Orange Walk was Icaiche Maya (the pacíficos). And Stann Creek was not as Carib as we thought. Where the Stann Creek District was concerned, no one focused on the Pomona Valley, an expatriate enclave, and this was where the wealth was. Pomona could have been a “district” unto itself. And in the Belize District, the division between the clerical browns and the working blacks was not appreciated in the districts.
Some Englishman or the other divided British Honduras into six districts. What was the rationale behind the border lines? Conventional wisdom was that the colonial masters did it for “administrative purposes.” Pardon me, but in the absence of evidence to the country, I have to think that the colonial ethnic division objective factored into that Englishman’s decision.
Every day, at least three times a day, there are brutal traffic jams at and around the Belcan Bridge. In addition, the smallest “fender bender’ accident in the area leads to traffic congestion in minutes. And when the traffic or police people, and sometimes a combination of both, decide to put checkpoints around the Belcan, lordy lord lord, you’re looking at disaster, total disaster.
The amount of working time and fuel wasted in traffic jams at and around the Belcan over the last five years, say, could pay for the lonely Marine Parade, where birds soar and lovers stroll. I know it’s a stretch, but the irony of it is that it is the Marine Parade millions which should have been used to solve the Belcan traffic. The Parade will go down in history as the monument in memory of the affectionate collusion between the Musa PUP and the pulpo.
Finally, my people, it now appears that when you hire certain lawyers, then you also obtain the services of the political party (and their media) with which they are affiliated. I have been listening to lawyers “try” cases on political party radio stations and in political party newspapers. (How about the octopus’ television station?) This can’t be good for the vaunted “administration of justice.”
It’s an irritating issue for I, because when I was a young man the PUP government tried to jail me on a charge of allegedly making a mockery of the “administration of justice.” Beloved, no one, I repeat, no one has done more over the years to mock the administration of justice in Belize than your sanctimonious PUP.
I rest my case.