When I was a young man I used to tell people I was a communist. All along, I think what I meant was that the footsteps of Jesus the Christ were the ones a person, if they wanted to take a shot at being good, should try and follow. Christ was no capitalist. When the mammonists came and offered Him the world, He said “Get thee behind Me, Satan”.

So, so many times in the New Testament the Christ spoke the truth about those who lust after Mammon. He told the rich fellow that a camel had a better shot of going through the eye of a needle than a rich man had of being worthy of the reward. He warned people about burying their talents instead of sharing it with others.

The Americans hammered Fidel for taking Cuba so far to the left, when it is they that chased him into the arms of Khrushchev. Fidel just wanted a more equitable distribution of wealth in Cuba, a Cuba that educated all of her people and gave them proper health care.

None of the American propaganda did more to damage communism than the movie, Dr. Zhivago. On seeing the good doctor come home to find that the communists had taken over his home, forcing him and his family into a little corner, and after seeing the cruel end of privacy, your heart had to bleed. Sometime after seeing that movie, I stopped calling myself a communist. I became a left-leaning socialist.

I’ve written on numerous occasions about what I accept to be the merits of capitalism, how no system produces more spoils than the daag eat daag world, but I’ve always maintained that you should be able to have that luxury only AFTER the needs of all the people are addressed.

The Mennonites are capitalist, but they take care of their own. They’ve earned the luxury to allow those of their members who dream of getting mighty rich to chase their dreams, because every mouth is fed, everybody is housed and clad, and all the children are schooled.

Some people we call lazy bohga just aren’t cut out to survive in the daag eat daag system. Some people we call lazy bohga are brilliant artists, athletes, and musicians, but our country is too narrow to appreciate the talent that God gave them.

I won’t call out Paul of Damascus for saying, let those lazy good-fu-nothing bohgaz starve, but I’d have to challenge him if he said, let the lazy bohgaz’ children starve, let them get a terrible education, let them not have food to eat and decent clothes to wear, let them suffer if they are sick.

It is a cruel country that justifies the suffering of children, especially the precious little ones who are ill. Our country should give every form of help to little children who are sick; for these little ones our country should try and make every day the best it can be.

Covid thoughts while I wait for results of my swab

Before I forget, big respect to the National Garifuna Council for putting the brake on the coronavirus by insisting that all the activities for the Garifuna Settlement Day celebrations go virtual. It is hard for us regular folk to hold it down, but when we have good leaders who show us the right path, we are more willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

Now we are headed in the direction of Krismos, and the difficulty is greater, because there isn’t one set of leaders responsible for that. The Christian churches have their congregations to control, and we can expect them to do right. The sober society will always vote on the side of common sense, so there’s no need to worry about them. But the batl pahn taybl crowd spawned by our Geng Brok past are always uncontrollable, and this year so much depends on them exercising the greatest self-control.

My advice is that the authorities design and run a series of infomercials to show this group how they should behave. If you are drinking you will become garrulous, so the six-foot physical distance is not sufficient. We should maintain a 10-ft. spacing, and all drinking must be done outside, with no more than five friends around.

Today, Sunday, November 29, 8:45 a.m., one week after I was swabbed, I’m still waiting for my results from the hospital. I’ve been in isolation since I got the call, and I believe those who have been in contact with me before I got swabbed shouldn’t fear, because I mask, I hygiene, I don’t chatter, I haven’t had a fever or a cough or a sneezing. If I have it, I suspect I’m what they call asymptomatic, and while such types can pass the disease around, I believe that only happens if they are ignorant or have no respect for others.

Congratulations to the new health team for recognizing that you cannot ask people to isolate if you don’t provide any support. If there is no support system, you wouldn’t want people to know you’re infected, because you have to sneak about to support yourself. I recall a doctor being embarrassed by the authorities because he left isolation to go to the shop. So, what were you supposed to do if you ran out of food or medicine? The last leadership didn’t think this thing through.

I will tell you something about the UDP, for which they are not alone in their guilt. They recognized their incapacity to deal with violent crime, so they came up with a tough measure called preventative detention. This preventative detention would have given the police the right to detain people who they suspected were about to commit a crime, and it was scrapped within three months of the government proposing it because we did not trust the police. Had preventative detention been implemented, would it have saved some of the more than 1500 persons who were murdered after it was proposed?

The UDP realized they couldn’t handle COVID, so they came up with the idea that the names of everyone who had the disease be handed to the police, so they could monitor the behavior of infected persons. The cry against that was confidentiality rights, and “stigma”, and fear that people would hide from getting tested if they knew that the police would have their names on file for the fourteen or so days that they were infectious.

I really don’t know about confidentiality rights when you’re talking about a very contagious disease. Did these confidentiality rights apply when we were in the battle against tuberculosis? I hear one reason for confidentiality is that some people would shy away from getting tested if their results would be public knowledge. Well, some people are shying away from getting tested anyway. I believe that if the government orders you to get a test, you have to show up for your swabbing when they tell you to.

Stigma shouldn’t be such a great concern, because the disease is cured in less than a month. Unfortunately, at the beginning of our problem there was an issue in Sarawee (I think that’s the village), where a man’s neighbors got aggressive with him and his family because they had received information that he was infected. Forget that the information was false; our leadership failed to address the problem properly.

I ask: which price is greater: people’s fear of stigma or, our people dying unnecessarily, our thousands and thousands of down hours because people are infected or sick, our health system being overrun, our very economic life being drained because one of the few tools we have to fight the disease is rejected by people who are petrified by stigma?

Of course, there’ll be no stigma when all of us have had it, but that’s something we have to do our all to avoid.