America the beautiful, then I look at Gaza

Jun 11, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – America!  America!

God shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea

I whisper a halting prayer.  What happened to America, the beautiful?  The one that I knew and came to love.  Beautiful through the warts, lovely despite the unholy.  I hear the lyrics of that song, and the goosebumps rise.  There is readiness to charge into hell for a righteous cause.  What about the cause of the Gazans?  How does the lush beauty of America fail to hear the plaintive cry of Gaza?  When America the beautiful transforms into America the pitiful, America the dreadful, then how can there be talk (me talking) of sacred liberty and the equality of man?  His rights to a dignified existence?  There is Palestine, and it is deformed into a monstrosity.

Food workers killed.  Hospitals bombed and bombed again.  Homes reduced to ruins.  A school-cum-shelter blasted.  People lived in the former, now scrape together some sort of survival from the latter.  And now a refugee camp overloaded with the helpless and the horrors of war, the ravages of an uncontrolled war machine, bombed in one more airstrike that shatters the stillness, and limbs, and ultimately lives.  Man may hunt animals.  He doesn’t bomb them, especially when they are trapped, on their last legs.  Animal rights and animal cruelty have lost meaning, somehow do not apply, at the higher order, that of human beings and human rights.

America, where are you?  Speak up!  Speak up!  Speak true.  Just this once, speak with clarity and authority and potency.  All of which comes naturally to America.  Say the word to Israel and stop the killing and maiming and hunting down humans like beasts to be destroyed.  The mechanized monstrosities of the Nazi holocaust is repeated on a lesser scale, but with no less effect, on a defenseless population.  The hunted have become the hunter.  Former misfits and those held as a lower life form now live their thirst for vengeance through unsated blood lusts.  Kill terrorists!  Kill civilians!  Kill the Palestinian people as if they are parasites to be snuffed out, at will, and with casual disdain.

What happened to the lofty Geneva Convention?  Why no due regard for the welfare of noncombatants?  Clearly, the Gazans are dismissed as termites to be extinguished without a second thought, a qualm.  I ask for the umpteenth time: America where are you?  The world’s policeman cannot take comfort in its newly adjusted role of selective protector.  Of Israel.  Of the atrocities and war crimes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  One word from the White House and Israeli hardliners and right-wingers and warmongers all fall in line.  The guns go silent, the bombs stop falling from the skies.  Why not months ago?  Why not long before today?  Though belated, why not now?  Tongues tied.  The UN hobbled.  The lobby is appeased, even when the people in Rafah and Ramallah and Khans Younis get to experience what it is to be Hiroshima, without the atom bomb.  The images are no less searing, the destruction even more compelling.

What can justify?  Why does America continue to condone through its feeble articulations and still unconvincing protestations?  America the beautiful, what has become of your nobler virtues, those civilizing graces that set apart?  I am ashamed.  More than ashamed: incensed.  At the unrestrained savagery.  The unchecked butchery of a people waiting, hoping, for a kind and protective word from those who pride themselves in being civilized.  The battles wage in the open and in secret.  The former Israeli Secret Service head having the freedom to threaten a senior ICJ jurist bent on investigating, exposing, and calling to book the Israelis for their war of terror, their war without humanity, on the Palestinian people.  Only PM Netanyahu could give the go ahead for such an operation that lasted years.

I am thinking what Guyana should do to register its disapproval, its own incandescent rage.  I call upon President Ali to absent himself from official American gatherings.  The Fourth of July observations and celebrations are coming due.  Guyana’s President Ali should not be present.  Nor vice president Jagdeo.  Nor any ranking Guyanese politician, including PM Phillips, Foreign Minister Todd, and Opposition Leader Norton.  We may be small, but small actions can have big meanings, convey so much about how we feel as colored people, as religious brothers, as members of the human race. There are different ways to manifest how we bleed red, white, and blue.  Or not at all, when unpalatable and unpardonable crimes against humanity are committed with relish.  I write about doing what is right.  I recommend doing what assuages the national conscience.  Take a stand.  Send a message, the strongest and sharpest one possible.  What I plead with the highest officials in this land to do, I must and will practice myself.  There is no better way to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.  There is never a better friend than when we summon the courage and the principles to call out our best friend(s).  As I am writing, children are starving and dying.  That must count for something.  These murderous, barbarous, and unforgivable outrages by the Israelis must stop right now.

America!  America!

God mend thine ev’ry flaw

Confirm thy soul in self-control

Thy liberty in law

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• America, equality, Gaza, GHK Lall, goosebumps

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