The Need For A New Beginning: One Of Self-Reflection & Correction!

By Lionel Bopage –FEBRUARY 4, 2022

Dr. Lionel Bopage

Today is the 74th anniversary when the British imperialists granted independence to a land they had conquered and exploited and whose racism towards the inhabitants was a marked tenor of their occupation. They left a primitive capitalist system of production – a plantation economy that was bereft of a manufacturing base. This system was semi-baked as the country had not matured internally to move away from the ideological yoke of feudalism and the system of forces and relations of production based on feudalism. One could say that even today, capitalism is a spectre that dreads the social, economic political and cultural stage of a land where feudalism is still ripe and being continuously revived by the ruling elite for their survival.

On this day, we can make a commitment to start anew, in the expectation that by the 75th anniversary of independence, we would at least be able to exercise the opportunity to acknowledge all the communities that inhabit our land, including its traditional owners, the Veddas, the First People of Lanka. So, let me start by paying my respect to the elder’s past, present and emerging of all the communities of the land of Lanka including its First People.

At the moment, the people of Lanka are going through multiple crises – political and economic. We should have done much better as a country. Of course, we can do better in future, if we analyse the current situation and are honest enough to understand what went wrong in the past and learn from those experiences. Such reflection would be a moment to explore about what we could have avoided in the past in order to prevent our whole society, the people, the communities, the families being divided and fragmented in a self-destructive manner. If we can do that successfully as a nation, as communities, and as a society, then we can expect better days ahead. It would give us the opportunity to celebrate in a way we have never done during the last seven plus decades.

We are not an ordinary people. We have survived a four century old colonial dispossession, and now close to a century old local dispossession. Historically, we have gone through several challenging times during many catastrophes that brought destruction to us, the experiences of which none of us can ever forget. We had many natural disasters and man-made conflicts that were brought upon us by the ruling elites and their cohorts. We have survived by looking after each other, by being generous, brave, and united.

We could celebrate and savour such occasions when the diverse people of our country e got together to assist each other’s recovery; leaving aside all the artificial barriers self-constructed or planted in our minds by others. What joyful occasions they were! However, in no time we lost those moments, as we were not vigilant enough, too inward looking, and self-focused. We soon returned to our tragic and redivided ways, pushed in that direction by a few power-hungry, self-seeking, greedy elites, and their cronies.

Those moments of togetherness and self-help, we need more than ever in our country. We need to celebrate and incentivise those moments that compelled us to be together, not only as families, but as a land of a plurality of peoples, faiths and cultures united as never before.

The whole world is going through another phase of the Covid pandemic, which apparently could cause unseen harm to its victims, both physically and mentally. In Sri Lanka, many people appear to be in the shadows, because as a society we are unaware of the plight, brought on by the pandemic. People are exhausted with the ongoing uncertainty, inconvenience, and disruption, like the rest of the inhabitants on the globe. People are still dying with Covid pandemic either diagnosed or not.

Children have been going through a very tough time, with no way of accessing remote learning due to a lack of facilities. Children do not have an environment where they could enjoy their childhood. They should be able to do so as they are going through the best years of their lives. The private tuition industry, transport chaos and teacher apathy have made the situation even more intolerable.

In face of this crisis our leaders have been apathetic, irresponsible, and self-aggrandizing. As a society, everybody appears to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), at times from multiple disorders due to the conflicts, war, and the day-to-day harrowing experiences we encounter. Still, the mental healthcare the people receive appear to be extremely limited. In the context of the pandemic, the children are the most vulnerable in terms of mental health. The sooner we provide better mental healthcare to those who are in need, the better it will be for the future of our society. It is essential therefore for the government to prioritise and take measures to provide mental health protection to the children along with their education.

Nonetheless, as a community, we are looking forward to a day when we can put all these painful experiences behind? Yes, we need to dream, believing that we have to make a start towards that day, otherwise that day will never come. It will come only if we are wise enough to discard our irrational thoughts, ill-feelings, and subjective animosities against each other, be it individual, familial, communal, or national. We need to put all that in the past behind us if we were to succeed.

That moment is here right before our eyers. If we can get this moment right, before it vanishes again for a long, long time, we could emerge as a united country: recognising and respecting the plurality of communities, we can confront the current multiple crises of economy, food, energy, health etc. and emerge as a better, fairer, stronger, more prosperous, and more united society.

If we wish to build a better future and a more resilient society in the land of Lanka, we need to learn our own hard lessons from the experiences that we are trying to forget. This will be the moment, the opportunity to build upon our best attributes as human beings so that we can realize our potential as a country as never before. This requires us to be courageous, strong, and thick skinned to grasp this moment, to discard ill-feelings and distrust towards the ‘other’; form our own empowered communities to lead this much needed national transformation.

Such empowered communities will generate their own leaders, who could provide the vision and leadership necessary for the future to mobilise all Lankans together as a nation towards realising this common ideal. They will demand a government that steps up to its responsibilities and fulfills its fundamental roles of protecting people, acting as a force for good and changing the lives of people for the better. While our peoples are confronted with extremely difficult socio-economic and cultural constraints, a few appear to be utilising the national resources for their own personal or family gains.

As a society, we need to work towards achieving rising living standards, secure employment in both private and public sectors, better wages and work conditions, better education and healthcare, and fairer and equitable opportunities, while at the same time safeguarding democratic values and human rights as a society within a pluralist environment with inclusiveness at its beating heart. A society where gender, race, faith, and caste will have no influence on the opportunities or possibilities for an individual to reach his or her full potential as a human being. For this to occur, we need a society that is reconciled with ourselves, with our history and with an understanding of our current social realities.

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