I always knew that someday someone with wallop would ride in and put a big, necessary hurt on Brother Clinton Canul Luna, and that day came and I say hurray. Ai, when I saw what Brother Canul Luna wrote in his column a couple weeks ago, I was driven back on my heels, wanting to put on my armor, but at the same time uncertain because I am flat-out tired of being kicked about by him and his many friends. You will forgive me for gloating. Of course, I took a drink. I thought about calling Miss Emma.

Brother Hart Tillett, in a letter published in the Tuesday Amandala, said, “Luna (Clinton) mistakenly thought that the ‘gods’ Haynes (Samuel) had in mind were the Baymen, and in that way the poem relegated other ethnicities in Belize to subservient roles, in particular those of Ibérico-Mayan lineage”, but in fact Haynes “was referring to the ‘gods’ of the Maya whose presence permeates the 145-word poem…”

Samuel Haynes, we know, was a leader in the uprising in Belize when our soldiers were disrespected after they returned home from serving in Arabia in World War I, and he later went to the USA to serve the cause alongside our greatest leader, Marcus Mosiah Garvey. According to one of our great heroes, Mr. Compton Fairweather, Haynes’ poem, which was put to song by Dr. Selwyn Walford Young, was written in the late 1930’s, and there is no doubt that the gods Haynes referred to, were Mayan.

You’ve heard about things sticking in people’s craw¯well, all the while Canul Luna was living in Mexico he must have been planning on how to smear “Land of the Gods (Free)”, and have it thrown into the dustbin, on his return.

I believe Canul Luna left Belize for Mexico before George Price’s favorite boy, Assad, came on the scene, but, devilish minds think alike. As there are people all over the globe who use the black cause to push private agendas, there are people who use the Cuban Revolution to advance theirs. Shoman gained a lot of fans via the revolution, and he used his popularity to savage the legacy of the Baymen.

I won’t condemn Canul Luna, totally, for his folly. As per the anthem, I too was once swayed, me because of certain women elements and their men friends who said they weren’t comfortable singing about pledging their “manhood”, and I even composed a song (thank God people dislike my poetry more than my prose), but I have to say that other women have come up and said, baloney, they understand perfectly that manhood in that sense is referring to the all-encompassing mankind.

This day, I am so relieved to be sidelined. Let me not insert myself too much between big people, especially when the one who deserves a pummeling is getting his hiding. I could say more, much more, but I’ll wait and see where the new champion is going, and then I will follow.

Oh, allow me to add that I hope Canul Luna is big enough to say “I was wrong”, that he takes the correction to mind, not to heart, because we need him to continue his work in the relevant revolution. I know he cares more for the greater cause: dealing with the philistine PUDP.

My, it is such a joyful day. Jesus said there is more joy in heaven over the saving of one lost sheep than there is for 99 who never strayed, and now I am sure we can say, welcome to the party to our lost brother who is now found, welcome to Brother Canul Luna.

No Uncle Ben

In America, you can’t find two more controversial and hated black leaders than Dr. Ben Carson, who is a fundamentalist Christian, and Brother Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. I don’t know if these men really dislike each other, but things they have said, hmm, might lead some to believe so. I don’t have the full details of their stories, but I know that after Carson said he would not advocate for a Muslim to be the person in charge of America, the Nation of Islam’s media started calling him, Uncle Ben.

Animosity would be natural. A Wikipedia page about the Nation of Islam states that it is “an African American political and new religious movement (with) stated goals…to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African Americans. Critics have described the theology of the organization as promoting anti-semitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric, and of promoting racial separatism, black nationalism, and of having promoted black supremacist beliefs in the past.”

Dr. Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist. A Wikipedia page on this religious group says that it upholds “teachings such as the infallibility of Scripture, the substitutionary atonement, the resurrection of the dead and justification by faith alone…They believe in baptism by immersion and creation in six literal days.”

In my book…look, I can see where certain black leaders dislike both men, where certain black leaders single out Carson for derision and some white ones like him, and where a whole lot of white leaders hate the ground Louis Farrakhan walks on. In my book, I respect both of these leaders.

My sense of Carson is that he is a man with a vision who cares deeply for his people, and he says non-life-threatening things he doesn’t really mean, because he feels it serves his objective to do so. He is a brilliant man who knew real poverty (President Obama didn’t have his life experiences), and he feels the model that rescued him from the ghetto could work for other deprived black youth.

Staying with Carson, I excerpted these bits from a 2015 piece in the New Yorker, “A Wing and a Prayer”, by Kelefa Sanneh, about Carson’s run for the US presidency in 2016.

Carson “grew up poor and black in Detroit, the son of a single mother who, he likes to remind audiences, could barely read.” In one address he delivered “a black-history lesson, enumerating a long list of African-American inventors who were, he said, absent from school textbooks, thereby depriving young black men of role models.” In a 1999 article he said that the US justice system “metes out different treatment to blacks and whites”….but Sanneh said that in 2015 Carson suggested that African-American frustration with the criminal justice system is misdirected, saying “I just don’t agree that that’s where the emphasis needs to be.”

Sanneh writes: “When Carson mentions racial uplift, he often adds a quick disclaimer, noting that his policies are meant ‘not only for African-Americans but for everybody.’. Sitting on the bus, though, he advocated a kind of economic separatism. ‘If we would learn how to turn our dollars over in our own community, two or three times, before you send it out—that’s how you generate wealth,’ he told me. ‘That’s how the Jews did it. That’s how the Koreans did it.’”

Sanneh says that “half a century earlier, Malcolm X made a strikingly similar argument, saying, ‘If we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we’re developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind.’ Of course, Malcolm X’s entreaty was accompanied by a caustic corollary that probably would not impress the Republican electorate. ‘Once you gain control of the economy of your own community,’ he [Malcolm X] added, ‘then you don’t have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business’.”

I said I don’t think Dr. Carson is all the bad things a lot of black leaders (and many Belizean Americans) say about him. He just sees through the dead-end street many of them are pushing, and the agendas that have usurped the upliftment agenda for black people around the world. I have more on the virtues on Carson, but I can’t close out without turning out a lie that is out there about the other great hero, Brother Louis Farrakhan, so more on Carson another day.

It is a damned lie they spread that Brother Farrakhan hates the Jews. I have heard the leader of the Nation of Islam call out that tribe’s leaders, not the rank and file. Farrakhan has said things like, “I do not hate the Jewish people…What I hate is the degree of control that they exercise over Black intellectual, cultural expression.” Permiso, more on these brothers later.