Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 11, 2020 Editorial
Kaieteur News – The initially inspiring Black Lives Movement (BLM) is struggling. The once invigorating protest movement now portrays the classic signs of a good thing gone wrong.
Amidst the sporadic mob rampages and street chaos, many clearheaded people, with an interest in the viability of the movement, are asking questions. Whose interests are the biggest priority incorporated under the BLM banner? Why is there the sense that the visions and objectives of minorities, especially those of Black Americans, have been lost or faded into secondary considerations? Why the thrusts of some of the movement’s outside forces? Who is benefiting most from the disorders fostered, the sustained anarchies? And when reason returns, where do the fallouts and failures leave black people and other minorities?
As these questions are contemplated, this much is conclusive: the circumstances of American Blacks have deteriorated considerably, with great disillusionments. There is enough blame to pass around about who did what and who should have done otherwise. It is now too late, with significant damage done. That is part of the tragedy of the minority story, particularly the continuing pathos of the black story. So much was promised; so much could have been possible; so much was wasted.
It did not have to be this way, where after all the raging energies, the heavy passions, the sustained pressures, that matters should come to this, have petered out to what says so much about what was gone about so poorly.
It is like a man fighting for freedom, but who is enslaved to the self-destructive. When he is done fighting, he is so enfeebled that he is worse off than before. The tokenisms of politeness, the concealed daggers arrayed against, the lack of understanding that all things and forces when spent had to come to this: the parlor of conversations, negotiations that lift a little, agreements that carry somewhere, of which there is none.
But what started out poorly managed and contained assumed the character of misdirection that fed upon itself and weakened itself and, eventually, brought it to the terminal of where to and what now. Those must be faced now.
What is shared on BLM today, as it has dominated America’s media, and stirred Guyanese, should alarm. Some developments on this idealistic movement, born out of great agony and unbottled impatience, are frightening. Some serious reengineering must be in the works, to get environment and those impacted the most back to some semblance of normal footing. As should become painfully clear, a long road lies ahead for those seeking to restart.
The first caption conveyed: “Minneapolis City Council alarmed by surge in crime months after voting to defund the police” (New York Post, September 16). That same alarm, but to greater degrees, plagues black neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of the United States now transformed into bonafide warzones by rampaging criminal gangs. This is an inevitable development from reckless calls to defund the police in kneejerk reaction that expose the poor and hardworking to constant violence.
The second headline sounded a first: “Survey reveals that Republicans, Black Democrats concerned about law and order issue” (New York Post, September 14).
A Monmouth University poll confirmed that white Republicans, non-white Democrats, and “two thirds of Hispanics and other non-Republican minorities also said the same.” This is unfavorable to BLM group(s) and any minority community forced to deal with lawlessness and disorderliness.
One report confirmed, “‘They end up shooting whoever’ – rising gun violence across NYC hits Brooklyn Housing project hardest, with four deaths” (New York Daily News October 24). Shootings have nearly doubled in the Howard Houses Projects with drugs, violence, criminal dominance and fear raging uncontrollably.
One lament heard is: “We march, we candlelight and have vigils, but nothing comes from it.” And, “if we don’t earn anything from all of this, nothing will change. It’s senseless. What is the value of Black folks’ lives?”
After all the ferocities, this is the result. BLM needs an urgent overhaul: visions, strategies, approaches and practices. Too many things were done wrong. They need to be made right. This was what a black woman who joined the BLM protests did when she made history in Missouri by winning a U.S. Congressional seal.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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