by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

This is America’s “great” gift to the people of Belize, the miniscule Caribbean states, particularly Haiti, and much of Central America.

But it is the pernicious (but lucrative for America’s vast military industrial complex) flow of guns and sophisticated assault weapons to these nations; plus Bill Clinton’s “three strikes and you’re out”, which helped to speed the mass deportation of Black, brown and yellow Belizean, West Indian and Latino youths from US jails—that are both responsible for this current tragic state of affairs. Many of these youths have very tenuous links to these Caribbean and Central American nations they neither know and understand, nor respect, and to which they’ve been deported. They are, therefore, as American as apple pie or bubble-gum. They’ve lived all their lives in a society where the rule of the gun answers to all things, whether at home, or abroad in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the rest of the Middle East, and Afghanistan.

Added to this mix is the lucrative narco trade, encouraged and fed by American drug dependency, and the incredible reluctance of subsequent US governments to massively and sustainedly re-educate the American people. Then there is the American gang culture, whose history precedes even that of the mafia in America.

These weak and economically challenged Third World states cannot stem the persistent outpouring of senseless violence by instituting temporary states of emergency. They need to address its roots, call out the source, hold it to account to use draconian and effective measures to stop the flow of small arms into their vulnerable societies, whether through fair or foul means.

And, these societies must immediately go into a National Emergency mode, bring out every dollar they can find to re-educate and empower their youths with technological, scientific, industrial, manufacturing, agricultural and creative skills, to enable them to compete in this AI world of the possible and seemingly impossible. There is also urgent need for an ideological-historical framework to formulate an essentially indigenous moral compass to guide these youths, as they have none. Enough of all the useless meetings, conferences and speechifying at home and abroad—ACTION is NOW. Or, do the politicians and the rest of the citizenry need several more Haitian scenarios before their “eyes clear” (as they say in my neighbourhood)?

By the way, the greatest American president of the 20th century was Jimmy Carter, whom God granted 100 years of life on Planet Earth. Here was a man imbued with deep and genuine humanity and love for all God’s children, which he demonstrated in so many practical ways, not only in America, but all the way to Africa and elsewhere, creating affordable and environmentally compliant homes for the needy, and trying to ensure fair play in nascent democracies as far flung as Africa’s. 

Carter’s one term as the 39th US president was marred by events beyond the control and fixing of even an Abraham Lincoln. “Honest Abe”, as he was known, was another truly great American president, whose victory in the American Civil war brought an end to the slavery of Black Africans in the US in 1865. Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential life represents the best American example of honest, principled behaviour, and genuine care for “the other”. His post- presidential years of humble, but effectual service to both Americans and millions of non- Americans worldwide, more than compensated for his four years in the gilded confines of the White House with its trappings of prestige and power.