There were a number of incidents that could have ended up as murder cases over the Easter weekend. In St. Margaret’s Village, someone waited in the dark and fired a shotgun blast at a man who was holding a child in his arms. In Bradley’s Bank, a retiree was held up by a man wielding a machete. In Belize City, a man was stabbed when he had a misunderstanding with another man. There were other violent incidents. Fortunately, none ended in loss of human life.
The Commissioner of Police, Chester Williams, said that he cannot recall an Easter weekend when there were no murders in Belize. It is no fluke that the first murder-less Easter weekend in a long, long time, occurred under the watchful eyes of the new hierarchy at the Police Department. They have been putting in the work, and we are making halting steps in the right direction.
The police can only do so much. The rest lies with a justice system that is a joke of the worst taste in the modern world. We have descended into a state where murder is committed with near impunity. If any of the violent incidents that were reported over the long weekend had ended up as murder cases, we know that it is unlikely that any person would have been found guilty of any of the crimes.
We have been checking online for the details of the 2019/20 budget, one particular interest being to find out if the state-of-the-art forensics laboratory that was promised in 2008, and again in 2019 at a business forum with the Chamber of Commerce, was budgeted for this financial year. We’ll have more on this when we see the complete budget.
We can’t forget the failure of our justice system. But today we choose to look at the candle that has been lit by the new Commissioner and the many hard working officers in the police force. They are deserving of our congratulations, for doing the best they could possibly do, over the weekend. Indeed, since Chester Williams took the helm as top cop in the country some months ago, there has been a reduction in murders.
In the horrid dark, there is a light.
More than prayers
If you were looking for a heart that wasn’t praying for one of our boys to take the garland on Holy Saturday, it would have been difficult for you to find one. Sometimes prayers alone are not enough. Our consolation is that we did extremely well in the race, considering what we, our nation, put in.
Every year, since 1928, the Cycling Association of Belize puts on this spectacular race that would attract cyclists from every country on the globe if the association could muster up more lucrative prizes and help defray the costs of travel. They do the best they can on their meager budget.
This race, the Annual Cross Country Classic in Belize, is steeped in history. It started in a time when the main road across the breadth of the country wasn’t much more than a truck pass, so bad that it was impossible to complete the journey in one day. At that time most Belizeans (then British Hondurans) in the western part of the country lived along the banks of the Belize River, and on Holy Saturday each year they came to the side of the road, to see the spectacle. They brought with them their sheep and chickens and turkeys, to offer as prizes to the hardiest youth along the trail.
Over time, the race grew, attracting young riders in neighboring countries. For the first fifty years of the race, no challenger from abroad took the grand prize. In time, they would become very competitive, and today, 91 years after the first race, the odds are that a foreigner will stride the podium. This year was the worst. There was no Belizean rider on the podium, the first three prizes going to cyclists representing Guatemala.
We really should be celebrating them, all foreign riders, for coming here and honoring our country and race with their participation. True, if others are to win we would prefer that the top three didn’t come from the Guatemalan National Team, but that is only because their rich elite maintain a territorial claim to our country. If those archaic leaders over there had got with it when the United Nations declared a better world order, we would have been saying, Thank God it’s the Guatemalans, not the Americans.
That’s not because we hate the Americans. It’s just that they, Americans, have so much, and thus their athletes and artists get the best the world can give, to prepare them for competition.
All things considered, our cyclists did really well on Holy Saturday, especially those ones who fly under the banner of Belizean American. We cried, and we continue to cry because they didn’t bring home the garland. We’ve got a right to cry because that prize belongs to us: it’s ours, but we really shouldn’t forget to celebrate too, especially for how well our cyclists performed.
The fact is that our leaders invest very little resources in our athletes and artists. And that’s what it’s all about in all things¯you get out what you put in. Our rivals in sports and arts give the best they have to their athletes and artists so they represent well on the world stage. We have a system where it’s every athlete and artist for himself/herself, and the prayers of our nation.
In volleyball, home-grown athletes are doing well in the region, largely because a few individuals go deep into their pockets to sponsor the players. In the 1970s Belize softball had the respect of the world, actually defeating the powerhouse Americans at the Pan Am Games in 1979. Today, any junior college in the US can defeat Belize’s national softball team, and we are an also-ran in Central America and the Caribbean.
It is hard to say where we were in football in the region in the 1960s, because we were blocked from entering FIFA tournaments, but the records show we were competitive against individual clubs. We’ve had our moments in football, but presently we are ranked ahead of a few Caribbean countries, but NO country in North, Central or South America. Basketball is doing well on the regional stage because we can tap into a fairly large Belizean/American talent pool.
Sometime in the 1970s, thereabouts, and accelerating ever since, everyone started leaving us behind. Previous to the 1970s, sports for the athletes in the world was mostly about ego, bragging rights, with the business of sports being almost exclusively the turf of the entrepreneurs. Then sports also became business for athletes and their sponsors, big business.
The mind of an athlete is a critical component. Athletes must have desire, must be fierce competitors, and they must be smart. People of old knew that the mind of the athletes was to be nurtured, but it is only in the last fifty years that countries have invested so much into sports psychology. People go to universities to study sports science, so they can better prepare athletes for competition.
All those efforts to hone the minds of athletes would be wasted if their bodies aren’t cared for. Our junior track and field athletes perform well every year in Central America, and they disappear when they reach adulthood. Belizean juniors are pretty competitive and that’s because the young human body is remarkably resilient. The young human being may not be as blessed with regenerative powers as some reptiles that can regrow body parts, but it takes a really bad injury to put a young athlete down.
The science of increasing human strength and speed has grown enormously over the last fifty years. There are sports specialists for nutrition, and therapy, and surgery, all involved with getting the best performance out of the human body.
Over the ages, athletes and those involved in their training have been studying different herbs and mineral supplements so they can make concoctions to improve performance. This has moved to the laboratories where chemists and biologists put their considerable skills into making drugs that allow an athlete to exercise longer, make the athlete’s body repair more quickly, drugs made to augment the athlete’s power and speed and endurance. As we all know, some of these drugs are illegal. But many are legal, and they are available to athletes if they and their sponsors can afford it.
How a nation’s athletes compare on the world stage is part of how its value is expressed. An athlete can have the perfect complement of mind and body, but if the nation they live in doesn’t have a culture of excellence, doesn’t invest in its people, doesn’t create the opportunities for them to test themselves against the best, mediocrity is the order of the day.
Our leaders need a vision bigger than the next election. Governments must set about the task of improving all aspects of the national product the minute they come into control of the nation’s resources. In the world of sports, youth who exhibit athletic skills and the desire, dedication, and discipline are raw treasures to be developed.
Those athletes who are selected to carry the nation’s hopes must be supported with the best food, training, and health care. They must also get the sponsorship so they can test themselves against the best in the world. The ones who will be great must climb the ladder, rung by rung. The athlete cannot attain a higher level if they don’t compete against the best.
Human beings belong to the world before they belong to a nation. You can be born anywhere on the planet, and you can take the nationality of a country where you weren’t born. We understand that: that’s why we celebrate all who take part in the race.
We also understand that we can’t give our athletes all the material things that some nations give theirs. If we found oil it might not make a great difference to our national wealth because the politico/economic system we have will channel the profits into the pockets of a few, and the foreign. So we must do better with what we have.
It is possible that even if we invest everything we can in our athletes, someone from abroad could still come and beat us; maybe another country’s athletes could even take first, second, and third place. But we would know that we gave the best we could to our athletes. We didn’t. We chose to put our funds into cement structures that can compare with any in the world, instead of putting some of the investment in our athletes.
Our cyclists did extremely well, though they didn’t place number one, two, three, or four. They gave their all. We, the nation, need to give them more. If we do, we’ll have more than our prayers invested in them next year.