To the Editor
My response to Men/Women of the Year – The Belizean Worker! Amandala edition dated Sunday, December 30, 2007 (op-ed).
First of all: I must congratulate you all for reading such an important book published this year. My wish is that all Belizeans who love their country could be able to access that type of literature.
Naomi Klein, like many great citizens of this planet, has been a candle in the dark, in a time when darkness continues to expand and envelop everything.
Your issue with the UDP not being forward in presenting their detailed comprehensive plan for economic development, can be easily seen as a chain of continuity. Both parties cannot offer programs that the vast majority of its citizens will approve of, because it will most likely be against the interests of their primary constituency. I am not referring to people who will be shouting: All the Way with PUP. Neither to the people who will shout: I was born a UDP and a “Wah Ded” a UDP. Their primary constituencies are people who sit at peace and afar from the roaring and the trampling.
So without anything that really makes sense – government policy not contested or questioned. Both parties agreeing on what their bosses tell them. Then, the choice of candidate will be based on style, good looking, professionalism, coolness of the candidate. The guy with whom we may be able to sit down and drink beer, or eat a barbeque with, or get hugs and kisses from.
Bob Marley in one of his songs said, “They want come cool I Op, but they can’t come cool I Op.” I will just add, they want to come soft I Op. But they can’t come soft I Op. We are at a point; I wish it was a tipping point.
We are at the point where the masters, local and international, have wanted us to be – with decreased psychological capacity, no more in control of our own life, without any meaningful say in policy – decisions making. Unable to set our own agenda, with the sixty seconds a minute down to fifty seconds. Yes, we are there and with a people reduced to those levels, then there is no need for the masters and those who do their bidding – I mean our politicians, to go through the work of thinking.
What has happened and has been happening in the countries of the Southern Cone of America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia) has been a – breaking away from the traditional order structure. And you don’t do that with a UDP style, much less with the type of policies that PUP have carried on.
You can only take such a course with the support of popular forces and grassroots movements. Those are radical steps: it’s like saying to the traditional masters “f— unu” and walk off with your own plan, a plan that has its strength in its people. In today’s world, with elite resistance and deterrence to democracy, the word “radical” is a bad word, a vulgar word, and the “educated,” the “intellects” and “decent” people of both PUP and UDP will not even use that word in their lexicon, much less associate themselves with it, when we know that it simply means taking on a problem from its roots, uprooting it if we really are for change.
We are where we are, and without any of the two parties out for disrupting the traditional order and the chaos that derives from such order structure.
I recommend that we just flip a coin head/tail, then choose the winner. But maybe it’s not a good recommendation because, as I write, I am being entertained. I am under the influence of mild euphoriant, but the public have yet to be entertained. So we need to vote, let them show their weight; show that they have a say, that this is a show of democracy before they are put back to their correct spot.
I will advise the UDP that we need to hear their plans, programs and proposals. We don’t want rhetoric. We want to perceive, not envision your mission.
We Belizeans who have not succumbed to the cultural and social managers, we who have found ways to escape constraints and have not been de-educated by the masters, know that the challenge is historic. We also know that despite the fact that the PUP is seen by most Belizeans as a bizarre political group who have engaged themselves in acts of madness, they have been heroic players for the domestic elite and to the neoliberal consensus. They have the money; they will have the support of the masters of the international economy; they have been good disciples. They would have had Milton Friedman’s blessings – the Chicagoans. They know how to “win” even “elections.”
(Signed) A concerned citizen