I almost missed out on the Senate meeting on Wednesday this week, but I came from bak-a-bush just in time to see the UDP senators take a terrible flogging and disgrace themselves. What the heck is wrong with Godwin? He forgets that the UDP at Wave didn’t want any part of him?

Godwin, — my how that man has lost his luster— said it was a labor of love for someone to work on Pay Scale 14 and 15 in the Public Service. He praised the PM for bringing the Perdomo write-off to the House because, he said, the PM could have snuck it under the table. And it’s an election year, Godwin blurted out in defense of his boss. Ouch, “Nobody mi wahn ask bowt it bikaaz noabodi mi wahn noa”, Godwin said.

I recall that when the UDP people at the Immigration Department brought Godwin to disgrace – it happened on his watch – he trotted out the same defense: nobody mi wahn noa if hihn neva taak.

Godwin, those people didn’t want you. They gave the junior minister a tap on the wrist. Dehn neva fire nobody. And the Wave crowd yooz tu yooz you up pahn dehn shoa.

Aha, a division was called for on the Perdomo write-off, and whoa, Senator Rocke didn’t follow instructions; whoa, Senator Rocke voted “no” and the UDP was defeated 7 to 6, forcing a delay. I guess if he didn’t laugh he would have bust out crying. Really, AG Pere, after all the bad things you people have done to the senator’s name, when the gentleman struggled for his soul, just once, did you have to laugh?

Senator Lizarraga punched the stuffings out of UDP senators

I could have titled this very short piece, “Every bully gat dehn kecha”. Senator Lizarraga spoke brilliantly on the amendment to the Contractor General’s law, and some UDP senators couldn’t take it. They interrupted repeatedly. If I interpreted them correctly, their excuse was that they aren’t being paid enough to seriously debate the people’s bizniz.

Ms. Barnett, Duncan, and Hulse saved themselves by shutting their mouths during Lizarraga’s delivery on behalf of the people of Belize. Pere, Coy, and Salazar weren’t that smart. Coy is a school teacher, so he should know that at times it is better to remain silent. When it was his turn to speak, Salazar struggled mightily to brush away his numerous earlier interjections, which even a middle school student would have known meant: we can’t spend so much time on the people’s bizniz because we have pressing personal bizniz to attend to which pay a whole, whole lot more than the pittance we are getting here. Bah, Payscale 14 and 15 no es nada for the big people.

AG Pere went straight to the gutter, getting personal with a challenge to Senator Lizarraga to leave his business and take up the Contractor General’s job.

Boy, would that crude joke have backfired if the senator who is defending the people had said, “Yes, I’ll take it.” My bet is that Barrow would have fired favorite boy Pere, inmediatamente. Imagine, one whole year of contracts under proper scrutiny, all because of Pere and his big chats. No, those UDP bohgaz who turn wohsara than the PUP couldn’t survive that.

To change the headline we need a new story

There are people in Belize who say they can’t handle the amount of horrific news in Belize, so they turn away to American sitcoms and other soft productions. Some of us believe that hard as it is to deal with, we have to, because it is the truth and it is best to face it.

There are a few people in Belize who believe that if the media downplays the horrific violence that is going on in our country, if the news about violent crime is relegated to segments later on in the news or on the back pages, that will help to discourage crime. Interestingly, some people in authority, police officers, believe that the media should downplay violent crime.

Their argument is that putting horrific news on the front line makes hardened criminals feel “big”, proud of what they’ve done, and they are also encouraged to do the crime again. Those might not be entirely empty words; quite likely there are a few very evil individuals who get a kick out of seeing themselves in the news for crimes they’ve committed against society. Putting such news in the by-the-way section, however, could have a worse effect. I mean, if I’m so hungry to be in the news, and I commit my crime and I get ignored, mightn’t I consider that I need to do something more horrific?

If you make an argument that putting a murder story up front is glorifying it, then the counter to that is putting it in the back means that you are hiding it. I really don’t think you can say there are too many murders, so make it a back story. If we make murder a back story, we become like ostriches trying to ignore our problems away. If we want the problem to go away, I believe we should be organizing pressure groups, and getting in the faces of our government ministers so they work harder and more honestly.

We can’t hide from what is happening to our beloved country. We were never saints, but we didn’t tolerate members of our society who lost respect for human life. We became tolerant when smart people started arguing vociferously for the human rights of people who committed murder.

The smart people are all lawyers

These smart people never consider that some people think that if you kill once you are going to hell, so killing another person is just a concern for the conscience, which they don’t have much of. These smart people read a lot of books, and while that increases your knowledge immensely, it does not necessarily increase your capacity to think.

The US FBI told us about a guy who said he loved killing people. These are the kinds of behemoths the human rights people are encouraging. Ridiculously, human rights activists have declared that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. They should tell that to 92 of the 93 victims of the serial killer. The US FBI say they might be able to link the man to 93 deaths. If they had caught him and put him to death after he took the first life, the only way he could have killed the other 92 would be if he had the capacity to kill after he became a ghost.

I’m not talking about the need to hang anyone. There is a duty a state has to defend itself and to give justice to the murdered and their circle of family and friends.

Hubert Elrington’s two great contributions to Belize are that he recognized that the PUP with Ralph Fonseca and Glenn Godfrey was a band of crooks, and that Dean Barrow was “all glitter and no substance.” I don’t know how bad a gang Fonseca and Godfrey with the allowance of Said Musa were, and I don’t think that Barrow has “no substance,” but nobody is ever all wrong.

Elrington doesn’t have much else for us to remember him for. He excoriated Sam Waight for a bridge whose only fault was that the floods came before the bridge was finished. He shockingly, shamefully, to his eternal disgrace, led the charge to prevent KREM Radio coming into existence. Remember that Amandala had fought, put their organization on the line to rid the House of a PUP that had to go in 1984.

It wasn’t promised in the UDP manifesto that KREM would be born. It wasn’t in the UDP manifesto either that the UDP would jail the owner of Amandala and his friends if they dared to go on air with a radio station.

I think that a leader who has much substance would have done more to change the story, so the headline, the feature would have changed by now. This season of murder has gone on for far too long. It is what it shouldn’t be.

We haven’t sufficiently gone after the causes of violent crime, and we could argue that some causes are not easy to address. There can be no argument to defend our failure to go after persons who commit murder. We fail to identify the person responsible in over 90% of murder cases. If I could put the blame on one set of people for this, my stare would fall on the lawyers.

What have the lawyers done besides show us that our justice system has many loopholes? When the government failed miserably on delivering the state-of-the-art forensic lab they promised, the lawyers should have come together to see how they could help to restore the balance of the woeful blindfolded lady. She can’t see, and she exhibits no interest in bringing criminals to justice.

Mr. Perdomo must have wanted to serve

The lawyers should have come to the fore when young Mr. Perdomo had to ask the government to pay the 40 grand because they did not care to deliver the lab they promised, and he wasn’t coming home to suffer without the tools to do the job with.

Look, if you’re wondering how I know all that, I don’t, no one told me, but if I hark back to when I was a youth, idealistic as all such people are, I have to believe that the young man, Mr. Perdomo, wanted with all his heart to serve Belize. In fact, if there’s no addling in my brain, it was his dad, former Minister of government and now Cabinet Secretary, who made the declaration to the nation that if the UDP won in 2008 they would deliver on a state-of-the-art forensic lab.

Young Perdomo saw the need and he rose to the occasion, made the giant sacrifice of leaving his country. He went abroad and busted his brains so he could get the knowledge to serve Belize, and when he’d done all that, the UDP, the double-crossing UDP, the disappointing UDP, said, by demonstration, ‘Young Man, we don’t give a daam for your learning, we are content with miserably failing the Belizean people in this critical area’.