Today we mourn the unfortunate souls who lost their lives in Nature's course, in the belly of Noel in the tumultuous Caribbean sea. Every year, the Caribbean basin and her eminent inhabitants must cope with the inevitability of hurricanes. This is the lot of Caribbean peoples, and they can only hope to minimise their loss of life in the face of something much more powerful than us all. But Noel, a category 1 storm which might have been considered relatively minor on the scale of possibilities, has devastated the Caribbean with all too much loss of life. It has exposed in its giant upheaval the fact that many Caribbean nations are still ill-prepared for disaster. Indeed, this is a feat that appears from the persisting images of hurricane Katrina to be too difficult even for the magnanimous USA. But in New Orleans, as in the Caribbean, the nagging issue of poverty remains the prominent underlying cause of unnecessary loss of life in the face of uncontrolable natural disaster. How can our people ever develop, faced with the obstacles of Nature and oppressive man-made class system alike?
It seems that the scourge of water and wind will never cease to threaten the very lives of those in the winward islands and above. Getting back on our feet every time is like having to give birth every nignt months, non-stop, sometimes of twin or triplet mighty storms. This time through we are told that less than 200 have so far lost their lives to Noel, in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, The Bahamas and Jamaica. The others have been spared this time, but until when? Can we organise our preparedness to Nature's wrath? Are our governments in a position to shelter their citizens from the cold wet breath of Nature? Should it be a free-market in protection measures offered to citizens in one country, meaning that if you are rich, you are more likely to survive than if poor in the same conditions? That, surely would appear seriously unfair!
However, this is today's unfortunate sociopolitical reality. Perhaps the boldest demonstration of the wealth disparity in disaster relief is in the recent fires in California. Watch carefully the rapid response time by both state and federal agencies to the hazes in the affluent California hills, and compare that to the slow and entirely inadequate responses to hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In this light, the recent onslaught of aberrant weather behaviour has arguably had the effect of unsheathing the stark realities of life: that the poor are treated with disregard by the system while the rich oligarchs who feed off of and corrupt the system are given first class service. Capitalism is unique as a philosophy in its cynical propensity to reward cannibalism and amoralism. War and natural disaster have therefore disclosed the badly kept secret that the hypocritical Eurocentric so-called Enlightened ones didn't want us to know: that this system is not designed to serve us in or out of disastrous times.
As Afrikans, we have faced the fires of the treachery of men for centuries, we have fallen to the weaponry and tactics of so many repressive armies of oppressors, yet cannot save our own children from the regular purge of the hurricane. Is this beyond our capacity for self-perpetuation to rise against factions and politrics and feed the people, clothe the people, shield the people? Aid will once more pour down on us like a great river of hope; already Canada has offered $500,000 for the immediate damages caused in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There, in Nova Scotia they are quietly and securely waiting in their cottages the strong winds that will come to them from a spent Noel. Do they care more about our children then we do ourselves? Do they have an interest in seeing us on our knees every time wind come? Be it as it may, liberty is seldom found in the curious and searching eye of the hurricane.
The battle goes on
The Dread Team
