After graduating from New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College and returning home to Belize in 1968, I’ve visited the United States on three different occasions: in late 1971/early 1972; early 1979; and mid-2012.  I spent a week in Los Angeles and a couple weeks in New York in 71/72; a few weeks in New Orleans and New York in early 1979, and a few weeks in Phoenix (Arizona) in 2012.

Because of my airplane phobia, I guess most of my time going to and from America was spent on buses on the road in Mexico and the States.

When I left the States in 1968, around June I guess, the Seventeen Proposals had been officially released a couple months before; Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in early April; and Bobby Kennedy, a candidate for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, had been assassinated some weeks later in California.

In other parts of the world, like Japan and Italy and Germany and France, there was great turmoil amongst their young people. At the center of all the uproar was a war being waged by the mighty United States in Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia which had been divided into North Vietnam (communist) and South Vietnam (capitalist) after the Vietnamese people had won their independence by defeating the imperialist French in a famous battle called DienBienPhu in 1954.

(Later in 1968, the Mexican military massacred hundreds of students before the Olympics in Mexico City, and in October riots broke out on the University of the West Indies campus in Jamaica when the Jamaican government refused to allow Professor Walter Rodney to return to teach.)  

The American war effort in Vietnam against the communist Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam had been stepped up in 1965, the same year I went to study in New Hampshire (and the same year Malcolm X had been assassinated in New York City.)

During my three years in America, young Americans began to rebel more and more, the reason being that the U.S. had a mandatory military draft for their citizens once they reached the age of 18; and American youth, especially white ones and those who were attending college, were aware that the Vietnam War was a dangerous and savage process. If you were not killed in the rice paddies, you developed a drug habit or you would be damaged by post-traumatic stress disorder.

While white young people were trying to get into graduate school, running to Canada, or demonstrating violently in the streets, black American youth were less informed and began to comprise a greater and greater percentage of American boots on the ground (infantry) in ‘Nam. And undocumented aliens were seeing the American military and the war as a life opportunity.

The Vietnam War divided and inflamed American society to an explosive extent. The U.S. essentially lost the war, and withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, whereupon the new president, Jimmy Carter, abolished the military draft. As a result, the temperature in American streets cooled down significantly. When I visited America in 1979, I didn’t see any street ferment or dissent.

The American military has become what their writers describe as a “professional” military, where you enlist voluntarily. Due to the composition of the American military, American parents do not have to send their sons to war. I can’t tell you much more than that. 

Internally, America was at peace after the draft was abolished, except where there were explosive racist incidents, like the Rodney King and George Floyd incidents. There were mass murder incidents, where the perpetrators were both foreign and domestic terrorists. And then there were the massive September 2001 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center buildings.

America became so relaxed by 2008 that a black man was actually elected president in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The coming of the Donald Trump phenomenon changed the mood in 2016 when Trump ran for president and won. The mood in the United States became divisive and violent when Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020.

Now Mr. Trump has won re-election and will be inaugurated next Monday, January 20, 2025. Even as only President-elect, Trump has already made some incendiary foreign policy comments. Most relevant to Belizeans is his vow to begin mass deportations of illegal immigrants on the very day he is inaugurated. We have to wonder how this will affect Belize, not only financially where loss of remittances is concerned, but also sociologically insofar as the integration of an undetermined number of our people who have become strangers in Belize. 

It is always tricky when there is a major event about to take place which will affect you, but you don’t know how. Many years ago, in the 1930s and 1940s, our people went to work in the Panama Canal Zone where the Americans were doing construction work on the canal which links the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. At the time, Belizeans had been living under British colonialism for many decades, after being emancipated from slavery in 1838. Belizeans who worked in Panama (as did some who worked for United Fruit in Central America) became infatuated with the American style and way of life; and out of the Panama experience arose the drive in Belize for our country to become separated from the British. We Belizeans became Americanophiles, and that remains the case today.

There has been a resurgence of white supremacy feeling in the United States, and it is reflected in a hostility towards immigrants, especially those of color. The fact that America was historically built by immigrants is not of any consequence to the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement which returned Donald Trump to power again. Next Monday begins a period of uncertainty in The Jewel.