Losing one’s identity has to be one of the most distressing, most life-changing experiences you could ever go through. To find out that your name, your credit, everything you worked so hard for, has been taken away from you, has been lost! Now, imagine a country losing its identity. Impossible? Unimaginable? A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a kind of tongue-in-cheek column about Belize in the future. At that time, I believed that the government was accepting 40 to 60 thousand more refugees into the country. I didn’t realize that they were already here, for decades, in some cases, and that the government is now considering granting them citizenship status! So the situation is even more dire than I first suspected. I think I mentioned in the last column that these people all have relatives in their countries of origin, who will gladly and quickly follow them here! To them, Belize is paradise, compared to some of the hell holes that they are presently living in! There has to be a referendum on such a drastic decision! I don’t think that this situation was on the mind of voters in the last election!

I don’t think that any country, especially in modern times, has lost its identity or has had its population overrun and displaced by foreign immigration. The Germans tried to annex Czechoslovak to build their Sudetenland, to populate the country with a majority German population. As powerful as they were, they failed. This was during WW2, and it was aggression in its fullest form. Here in Belize, it’s a peaceful, almost undetectable invasion, in slow motion.

This should not only be of concern to black Belizeans, it should concern all of us. All of our cultures, whether Mayan, Creole, Mestizo, Garifuna, East Indian, will be affected by this anomaly! Every single one of us, regardless of how much we think that we’ll be safe. It will affect our languages, our food, our music, our political system, everything! Majority rules, and we will have to adapt to their way of life, and believe me, there’s a huge difference there! Cuttobrut, tableta, stretch mi guts, duckunu, rice and beans, will start disappearing as the demand lessens; our music, our heroes, our way of life, will all become unrecognizable! I included our favorite sweets for effect, but you get my drift.

This is just a bleak, dark, dystopian vision, my vision, of what lies ahead for the precious Jewel. A lot of us won’t be around anymore to witness the disturbing phenomena, the subjugation, and disappearance of a once proud, happy, people! Land redistribution will be right there on top of the list! If you don’t own land, you are powerless! We have no Laocoon or Cassandra to warn us of this impending disaster! We are seeing it unfold as I speak, before our very eyes, slowly and inexorably, and remain silent. Wake up, Belize!

“Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land?”— Sir Walter Scott on patriotism.

Glen