As I have often noted here, I have uber-schadenfreude over the Brexit problems in the UK because I hate so much how the Bastard Raj ruined lives forever. It is such an anger that has also made sure that my travels have not even included a pit-stop in the island that has increasingly become irrelevant on the global stage--as it should be!
“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.” As in no British man. Over two centuries, Britain royally fucked up a good chunk of the world. The effects of all that raping continues to manifest itself from Hong Kong to Kashmir to ... Cameroon.
I was compelled to quickly catch up on how the bastards messed up Cameroon, thanks to new people that I met. I suppose the more I meet new people, the more we understand how much we are all in the same boat. Or, as MLK put it: "We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now."
"We have over 200 languages back in Cameroon," he said. The colonial history has pretty much driven those languages to extinction. His pain about the dying languages, especially his own, was evident. When the colonizers exited, after plundering the lands, English and French became the official languages. Those language divisions are also today's political divisions.
The story of the United States is also one of colonial settlement by those islanders, whose king eventually lost the fight to retain his hold over the territory. Whatever propelled the pale-skinned to trot all over the world and remake the places and peoples is one I can never understand, how much ever I intellectually engage with those topics.
Unlike the past that is filled with colonizers eradicating and enslaving the "others," the future looks infinitely better only because of the young.
At the Thanksgiving gathering, as we sat with plates loaded with food, the host said her young teenage daughter had one thing to say. With a smile, the girl said, "I want us to recognize that we are on the land of the Kalapuya people."
The kids are alright!
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