“The absence of millions who pass away is generally never observed, because their deeds for the good of humanity, their race and their nation were never registered.”
– The Philosophy & Opinions of Marcus Garvey, A Tribute to the Late Isaiah Morter, page 90, page 90
Belize’s population is just over 300,000, and while we are often caught up mostly with what is happening inside our own borders, the recent swine flu scare has forced many of us to look at the global picture, and particularly the plight of so many around the world who can ill afford to care for themselves in these perilous economic times.
The economy of the Great United States continues to be in recession, and the slowdown caused by the swine flu alert will, no doubt, hit some countries in a significant way, worsening the economic crisis for many poor around the world.
Here in Belize, we’ve been spared so far by God’s grace, and though no major thanksgiving ceremonies have been announced to openly acknowledge it, we must take note and take stock of our situation, and be grateful that so far, we have not buried any bodies on account of the swine flu.
However, what cannot escape our attention is the fact that gun violence continues to plague this commercial capital, Belize City, and most of the victims continue to fit the same profile – young men of African descent.
Some speculate that because over 95% of the deaths from the influenza A (H1N1) virus (swine flu) have occurred in Mexico, that perhaps the virus is a man-made virus engineered to be specifically fatal to Latinos. (Of course, this does not explain why Hispanics affected elsewhere have not died.)
That baseless theory aside, we know without speculation that gun violence has found its prime targets in Belize among young Black men, and it cannot escape our attention that the same sort of alert sounded for the swine flu has never been sounded against this fatal phenomenon.
In the process of doing statistical research about the swine flu, we learned that in excess of 200,000 people are counted dead each year from what has been dubbed the common flu, and an additional 1 million (1,000,000) are counted dead from malaria.
In Belize, lifestyle diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, road traffic accidents, violence and HIV/AIDS are among the leading causes of death. Several hundreds of people from our already small population fall each year to these very real and present threats to our existence.
But we cannot only think local when it comes to these problems. In the most developed country in the Caribbean – Trinidad – crime is also a serious problem, and one newspaper headline there last week screamed: “Bodies Everywhere:” One woman was thought to have died from the swine flu, but officials there confirmed that another medical problem had caused her death. Another woman was brutally murdered in that same jurisdiction.
Development does not solve the problem for poor people, and for people of African descent, when it allows too many young souls to fall into the trenches. Their violent passing often makes the headlines, but usually that is all that is ever heard of them. Scarcely do we hear the accounts of boys who wanted to turn their lives around – away from the idleness and futility of crime – but who were denied that chance to be counted among the nation builders.
Poverty is never an excuse for a person to spend his or her life being unproductive. The story of Isaiah Morter is a compelling one, and one that should resonate among our people, to inspire hope among despondent youth who have a hard time believing in themselves, in their self-worth, because all too often it seems that the only time someone cares is when they become the next statistical murder, and a mother cries on television begging for answers so she can understand why, and pleads for justice from a system that no longer inspires confidence that in the end, justice will prevail and this mad cycle will at least be abated.
Isaiah Emanuel Morter. He started out poor, but he was ambitious and determined to rise out of his difficulties. By today’s economic standards, he was worth millions. Even though many who amass such wealth refuse to share, Morter did something that proved that he was a man of true substance, bearing true love for his race: He left two-thirds of his wealth for African Redemption, in care of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Sadly, today, that heritage is still the subject of legal contention, and those who were supposed to become the beneficiaries of his noble gesture have continued to suffer from the double tragedy of being historically denied, and of being denied again now, what is their economic right.
For as long as there continues to be a disparity in the distribution of wealth in Belize, for as long as merchants are allowed to rape consumers, attaching unfair markups to very basic items such as milk and essentials such as medicine, and for as long as we continue to export our dollars and our sweet crude oil and import inflation, even more of our people will fall below the line of indigence, and their options for positive contributions to Belize will continue to grow narrower and narrower – and needless to say, in this era of accelerated social decay, the consequences of that happening are more dire than the threat any swine flu can bring to our borders.
We can continue this madness, living as social prisoners without walls or bars binding us, paralyzed by our own sense of despondency, inadequacy, and the under-dog mentality, or we can start a mental, spiritual, psychological and economic revolution, the way Morter did for himself, despite his humble origins.
John Wideman writes in the introduction to Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) that, “Prisons, ghettos, concentration camps, barrios, favelas, colonies, can restrict mind and body, kill both, but until the spirit is extinguished, the possibility of freedom lives. Freedom’s about choice. The self-grounded, self-motivated decision to imagine (create) a range of choices and the resolve to choose among them.
“This internal work orients us to our surroundings, not magically but with a force literally transcendent… Even in the most extreme circumstances, freedom exists—the African who jumped the slave ship into the roiling Atlantic Ocean.
“Freedom is an attitude, a principle that operates perhaps most visibly in spite of resistance.”
The lesson here is that one cannot and should not depend on a system, on a government, on an NGO, or even on their families to liberate them and chart their course. The revolution will only come when we hunger for it, when we want it so badly that we move to claim it, despite the ghettos/open concentration camps and the neo-colonies we call independent nations.
Go back into to the annals of Belizean history. May 29, 1773: This date marked a notable revolt that epitomizes the spirit of resistance that is at our core as Belizeans. It is testimony of our potential to shake the foundations of a system that is hell-bent on oppressing us and restraining our true potential, because in that system there must always be an elite class hovering over a working class, and an underclass they take joy in trampling. But one can only trample you if you lie down and take the licking – not if, like the legendary Bob says, you “get up” and “stand up,” the way the Toledo Maya are doing, determined to claim customary land rights.
Belizeans cannot continue to be so complacent about crime. Too many lives are lost to this avoidable epidemic/pandemic, and it still seems that we don’t care enough to deal with the problem.
Record numbers of over 100 died last year in this very small corner of the Americas. Couldn’t one of them have become an Isaiah Morter? A Philip Goldson? A TV Ramos? A Marcus Canul? A Julian Cho? A Barack Obama? (who, by the way, did the impossible in the name of Martin Luther King and figuratively made pigs fly!) Couldn’t one of these boys from the ‘hood have instead died with a legacy of hope to leave the next generation? We are losing unborn heroes in the blink of an eye, too fast, too furious. Extermination is chosen over transformation. Their death may not be in the millions, but their worth surely tops that figure. We declare that the time has come for us to stop impoverishing Belize.