The new world order is upon us, according to the pundits. Fasten your safety belts because we are on our way to hell. These are the same ones who claim that they may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but they fear no evil. Thy rod and they staff are with them... but thy rod and thy staff comfort them, as their cup runneth over and yours is drained.
They care little about your cup running anywhere but dry, and you fill them up with your blood and you believe in them and they tell you what you think and they read for you. The problem with democracy is that it needs you to read for yourself.
As a people, we embrace the idea of the state of legal prostitution. Women are still the property of their fathers and husbands, but the community is not allowed to question how their politicians run their country and move beyond reproach. Funny how the valley of the shadow of evil can become the promised land and then go back to being the barren wilderness where Jesus was tempted for 40 days and nights, except, perhaps, that was left out of the teachings the leader has proclaimed worthy of note in church. The scripture shall be rewritten to empower those who serve to oppress those who are being oppressed and paying for the house, the Rolls Royce and the yacht.
We seem to have moved into a place where governments sell land to other sovereign governments and refuse to give the citizens who look to their leaders the power to buy onto the land ladder. We choose to end long-term relationships and give over the power of a country to a savior who professors his take back, but never mind all of that, they will tell us what to think.
According to my people's thinking leaders, women should not choose to be equal to any man, for to be equal to any man for any woman will create disrespect. Fanon talked about the reality of mental enslavement and the fact that the negro would enslave his own mind and his own people. However, when it comes to that, the negro will never see it when and as it happens.
As the land is sold off, the power removed from sovereign governance and placed in the hands of businesses and the dreaded foreigners whose check books live offshore, we enter into a new beginning. This beginning dates back to an age of inequality where black people could not own land in this country because they were chattel. The same Bible they revere was used to justify their enslavement. But never mind that minor detail!
James Anthony Froude and Edward Long argued that slavery was good because it protected the negroes from their inability to govern themselves. If they were left in the wild, they would be dead. Slavery is all good and the fact that blacks are like monkeys is a known scientific fact, according to someone's science. Can that science be compared to the same science that says women cannot think for themselves, that they cannot work, they cannot see reason and they cannot be humans, much like black people could not be people? This is much like Black men were/are all rapists and sodomites. Yet we seem to revel in this kind of thinking.
Does it not disturb us that we cannot see balance sheets, nor government agreements? We do not even know what they see as murder and what they choose not to see, report, document at all. We may have given over our ability to read to our leaders, but this too can be relearned. Imagine, something that was so hard fought for by the former enslaved Africans during slavery and after emancipation just being whistled away in the wind! We seem to be throwing away so much of everything that was hard won, fought tooth and nail for, to get a minimum-paying, no-benefits job that can be temporary, but never mind that.
As the ministers say, 'do not question my intentions nor shall you challenge my ability, nor my leadership, nor my dealings, nor when I tell you to think something, we are moving into unchartered territory, I will lead you into the valley of the shadow of death, but I will stay here in my Pradaville and lend you a hand if you need it. Maybe!
Democracy is a problem, especially when it is beaten into submission by the same text that justified it being denied to an entire portion of the world because they were too inferior to understand it and how it worked. Democracy is also a problem when the same system of blind-faith leadership, non-accountable ownership and disempowering laws that bludgeon into oblivion the same people they claim to empower while using their tax money to sell them into a new kind of slavery.
Why, in the 21st century, though not willing to read, though not interested in legal rights, nor in seriously empowering ourselves beyond day labor, are we allowing people to use our voices to silence us? We are so concerned with judging everyone and sending everyone who does not think as a pastor says to hell. In fact, when Jesus was 'learning' how to be Jesus, he steered clear of those very Scribes and Pharisees who were supposed to know what was what. Yet we so absolutely empower them that they lock us in a cell and throw away the key.
It is no longer ironic that the same tools used to oppress the majority during slavery are being used to imprison them in poverty during freedom. Yet, we all understand that we are free to think, to act, to be ourselves. Sadly, we are not allowed to be who we are. We are told that we are not worthy of thinking, of asking questions, of understanding what government is doing. And goodness me, let you not ask for justice or rights because that really raises red flags and your rights will be removed from you in the name of developing the state.
We are a tourist destination that does not want tourists. We want to be able to pick, choose and refuse who spends their money here. We do not want them to interfere in our Christianity, but we want them to pay to keep us alive. We are, much like the world we claim to be better than, asking for things but saying that we only want white Christian people with clean money and a Bible in hand.
When Jim Crow laws were legally enshrined in the United States it allowed blacks access to inferior spaces that only they could access. They were not citizens in the same way as whites. In Australia and Canada, all the first peoples were sent into what could be called concentration camps because Christianity said they were less than human.
During the Holocaust Jews were said to be less than human, and certainly less than the Aryan race, and all of this was supported by the good book. So, as we continue to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, without questioning the power we give to those who lead us blindly into temptation, (especially if you are a woman, you should not be married although their scriptures tell you that you must be married, yet being married means that you have fewer rights than when you are single), you cannot question. The irony is that as a Christian country, we condone the exploitation of married women and empower the men who exploit them and us. We argue that it is okay to exploit those who are not Christian because they are foreign or female, never mind that the same good book tells you to look after that foreigner/female.
We are being made second-class citizens in our own country through our own design and then we justify it with the good book that was used to justify slavery, to empower Jim Crow, and to remove the land from the Aboriginal people in Australia. We choose not to see it in our country. And, when a woman is raped and left to die on the side of the road, there is no record of her, or the crime against her, she does not count, according to them.
Thy rod and thy staff have been taken and all that is left is the good book to placate those who are told to chew cud to cut the hunger. As Chinua Achebe said, they gave us religion and they took the land. We are allowing a group of people to destroy us with our own voices.
o Ian Bethell-Bennett is a lecturer at The College of The Bahamas.
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