No sense of pride

Dec 14, 2013 Editorial

Pride is something that keeps many nations from going under to lesser foes. In fact whoever came up with the symbols of nationhood were giving people a rallying point for their pride. The result is that nations have gone to war over the disrespect of the national flag. And protesters, to make a point, often burn flags. Very few things could incense a people more than to watch their national flag desecrated.
From an early age people are drilled in the feelings of national pride. Some schools even take this issue to great lengths. Queen’s College drills esprit de corps into its students and this has been the case for as long as the school has been in existence—almost 100 years.
So it is that two students may not even be known to each other but if one is a victim of an attack by an outsider the other is bound to intercede or face a severe sanction from the school. Similarly, a people do not sit idly by while one attacks one’s country.
Guyana with hardly anything that anyone would consider a military might, has not sat back to allow Venezuela with its superior military capability, take a significant part of its country, regardless of how uninhabited that section of the country is. National pride is responsible for that reaction.
But ahead of national pride there is self pride. People take care in how they appear to others. That is why when people go for interviews they take special pride in how they appear to the interviewer. Even speech is affected by the pride one feels. And people ensure that their children are endowed with pride. That has a lot to do with how the child performs in the classroom. The more pride the child has the better he or she should perform. To see that child slumped in a web of sadness is to see a child whose pride was dented because of his performance.
As a Caribbean people we abrogated our individual accents to speak like the people in the adopted country simply because we did not have pride in ourselves and in the things that make us what we are. Prior to the pre-independence era our men and women left these shores for one reason or the other. They returned with expatriate spouses.
This is not so much the case these days. In fact, even in the adopted country there are enclaves of people from this corner of the world who maintain their identity. Not so long ago, the police in Queens, New York, claimed that they needed an interpreter to interview the residents. Less and less do Guyanese lose their accents; Caribbean people on the whole are less likely to lose their accents in a foreign land these days. They all say that they are proud of who they are.
But ever so often one has to question the extent of national pride in a person or in a group of persons. Such questions are being asked of the West Indies cricket team. For the third time in four Test matches the team was obliterated within three days—twice by a higher rated India and once by a lower rated New Zealand.
Just one year ago the West Indies made a clean sweep of the Test matches and the limited overs games, including one in Miami. And this was the same West Indies team that had its management and its captain cooing that the team was where it predicted it would be at this time. That announcement was made with pride.
Weeks after that proud announcement we have foreign commentators talking of the pride less West Indies, people who seem to have no sense of pride. These views were first uttered when the very West Indies became the first team to play cricket against South Africa when that country was allowed back into the International Cricket Council fold.
With one day to finality, the South Africans had the upper hand. The older players accused the West Indies of having no pride, of having no sense of history. These comments needed no explanation but they evoked something in the players. They went on to win that inaugural match. Not so today.

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