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Dirty money y la ciudad sin piedad

EditorialDirty money y la ciudad sin piedad


In communities and societies where drug trafficking becomes powerfully entrenched, then gambling, counterfeiting, pornography, prostitution, child trafficking and the like become the order of the day. Traditional morality is thrown out the window, and it becomes a case of anything goes. Eat, drink and have sex, whatever sex, because tomorrow we die.


In Belize one of the things our people have been wondering about is how heartless we, as a people, have become. The city has no pity. This is a reversal of the way we were just three decades ago, when we cared for each other.


The drug dealer considers the drug addict with a contempt which frequently becomes dislike, even hatred. (When we speak about drugs, we are speaking about crack cocaine.) The crack addict hustles 24 hours a day to buy his fix, and he will wake up the dealer any hour of the night to make a purchase. Even though the drug dealer knows that the crack addict is the source of his livelihood/wealth, he views the addict with the distaste the rest of us law abiding citizens have developed for our homeless, our mentally ill, our AIDS victims and our poverty-stricken. We are saying that the relationship between the drug dealer and the drug addict has become the prototype of the relationship in the streets between those who are working and functional, on the one hand, and those who are desperate and needy, on the other.


The irony of the relationship between the drug dealer and the drug addict is that the stress wears on many dealers over a period of time to the point where they begin to use the product they sell, they themselves become addicts, and then the drug dealer becomes a drug addict, and the object of someone else?s contempt/dislike/hatred.


The lesson here is for those of us who are working and functional. We have to find a way to avoid developing the callousness and cruelty of drug dealers when we observe and interact with those who are losers and victims. No matter how strong we think we are, there is no guarantee that we will never share their fate.


On New York City?s Wall Street in 1929, the stock market crashed. Multimillionaires became beggars overnight. Some killed themselves. The American songwriters created songs which became classics. ?Nobody knows you when you?re down and out.? ?Brother, can you spare a dime?? Few of us in Belize will rise as high as multimillionaires. But many of us could fall as low as beggars.


In the Belizean value system dominated and defined by narcotics, most of us are willing to give up our soul to ?gain the world.? We all want to be winners. And presently, the people who appear to be the ultimate winners in Belize are the drug traffickers. They have now become respectable. They control ?honorable men.? That is what the Belizeans in the SPEAR poll are saying.


As common people, we have to fight to make some sense out of this nonsense. We are being buffeted by storms which were not of our making. Let us not lose courage. It is in the struggle that we live. Let us not cast away our human compassion. Remembering always, that there but for the grace of God, go we, we will seek always to preserve the love for our Belizean brothers and sisters.


Power to the people.

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