"If and only If we were patriots and reasonable" :

By Guyler C Delva

"First let us agree on a fact that is difficult to refute : we Haitians today have a serious problem of patriotism. We never miss an opportunity to push the country further every day into the abyss of instability, poverty, corruption, inequality, injustice, indignity... saying elites compared to the rest of the population, which languishes in misery and ignorance, constitutes an unforgivable denial of humanity.

How to claim to love a country while constantly wanting to defile it, to dishonor it ? How can you want to show your love for Haiti by contributing daily to its impoverishment, to its historical deconstruction, to its destruction ? We Haitian elites should be ashamed of this, but unfortunately we do not have a sufficiently sharpened awareness to realize the damage, calamities and disasters that we continue to inflict on the community, given that we are obsessed with our petty interests and our voracious appetites.

Indeed, if we really loved Haiti nothing could prevent us from sitting around a table - members of power, of the opposition and of civil society - to come to an understanding, in a reflective process, on the different stages to be cross to adopt a new constitution, organize good elections and put the country on the rails of socio-economic and political progress. If we truly loved our country, nothing could prevent us from agreeing on the need for profound reforms to establish an era of good governance, transparency, accountability, justice; to fight impunity, corruption...

Are we to believe that the Creator has granted other peoples and elites, including our Dominican neighbors, a faculty or capacity for collective discernment that it has failed to attribute to us ? Why can Dominicans sit down, talk to each other, agree on the imperative need to defend the superior interests of the Dominican Republic, while we Haitians cross all the red lines that establish the prohibitions when it comes to act to preserve the interests of this Nation ? I always hate having to remind people that the greatest evil in Haiti is us Haitians.

To gauge our behavior, it seems that we are acting under the effect of a psychotropic cocktail that has placed our consciousness in a state of debility and permanent dysfunction which generates in us a pathological fixation on the 'goodness' of the evil which suits us individually or personally. Are we finally in the midst of a collective psychosensory crisis where everyone's conscious or unconscious hallucinatory manifestations become a normative reality and accepted by all ?

But for God's sake! Let us be ashamed of ourselves ! So let's not be ashamed to be ashamed !

It is obvious that Haitians must strive to enter a new cycle of political and socio-economic functioning. And that necessarily requires the adoption of a new constitution and the organization of free, democratic, inclusive and credible elections on a regular basis, but all of this would be conceivable if and only if we were patriots and reasonable. Hopefully we will one day be !"

HL/ HaitiLibre