Obama can't be bothered with our delusions

Obama can’t be bothered with our delusions

Aug 18, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,

Poor Barack Obama, militant forces here in Guyana are trying to get him to fight for their cause, but the chap seems to have his own headaches to think about.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is reporting that right-wing militia groups in the United States, incensed by the election of the first black US president, are rising again after a decade in decline. In April of this year a government report warned that right-wing extremists are exploiting America’s economic woes and the election of a black man as recruiting tools for private armies.

President Obama has little need for activists in Guyana trying to use him as a champion to their cause of often made-up racial grievances. Imagine, some are even screaming about genocide and expect that foreign powers will take them seriously.

In Obama’s own country, the SPLC says, the latent rage of white supremacist culture is aimed especially at the federal government because it is presently headed by a black man. Obama has no time to play referee in an instigated racial conflict in some obscure South American republic such as ours.

Predictably, the activists in Guyana will say that their attempts at engaging Obama have nothing to do with racial power even though one wrote recently that Obama is closely watching the debate about Indian indentureship and Black slavery in Guyana.

It is not clear if the activists tried engaging Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in their imagined cause. Or how about the influential Jimmy Carter? Carter played an important role in Guyana’s democratic process in the past. Have the activists approached him?

No? I wonder why they chose the Obama administration instead.

These people, it seems, will try anything except the right thing to get themselves into power in Guyana.

They can exclude the American President from their racial scheming, not only does Mr. Obama have his own very serious problems to resolve, but this brilliant man will see right through their appeal to “kith and kin”, even if they try to dress it up as something else. Screaming genocide might get some attention, but what will happen when people realise that you’re trying to lie your way to political power?

Justin de Freitas