Peace for the World

Peace for the World
First democratic leader of Justice the Godfather of the Sri Lankan Tamil Struggle: Honourable Samuel James Veluppillai Chelvanayakam

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Politicians Please Step Aside & Let The Civilians Untainted By Rackets & Racism Run A Caretaker Government 

Chris Dharmakirti
logoSadly, our island has in the recent past slid into a flat spin space, wallowing in hatred and revenge, and fear and greed, and a lot of negative energy is dragging our island’s spirit and potential down. It is a real shame that our elected national leaders cannot see the wood from the trees.
The people of this country wants goodness to return to our island and for us all to live peacefully and respectfully of each other, and mindful of the sensitivities of each culture, and also be cognizant of the geo political realities and also our own internal majoritarianism reality and also the fear factor about the narrow interpretation of democratic representation by restricting it to the divisive geographic constituencies to harness the electoral vote, and this model has only caused grief to our island.
We need to see the faults where they lie, objectively with the island’s overall good in mind, and not make it personal and get into the blame game. Time for us to stop this immature behavior and realize that each of our elected leaders have some positive side to them, and they can contribute those attributes only, and leave civil society to fill in the gaps, and collectively work as one unified team to help our island back on its feet.
We are so stupid to be divided on party lines, which, as it stands today, is a facet of sectarianism, where the political parties face off each other not just only on economic or social and poverty related policies, but largely on the sectarian construct of caste, creed, religion, race , and even secondary school. So they get nominated by their political parties to canvass for their particular caste or creed, or religion or race, and this leads to irreversible divisions as they sow the seeds of hatred in their campaigning.
I myself have been a victim of that thinking, when I have evaluated the imbalance in population growth among the different communities that live on this island, and clearly there are concerns, founded and unfounded, that is stirring a fear psychosis about future demographics of the island. This matter needs to be discussed frankly without hurting the feelings of anyone, and as a island, with limited landscape, water, and other resources, we need to ascertain our carrying capacity for human habitat in each geographic area, and decide on how best the land usage should be determined, be it for human habitat, or agriculture, or industries, or for transport and energy infrastructure, and other important priorities like catchment area protection, prevention of soil erosion, mangrove protection and replanting, and a host of more pressing issues.
There is a lot for us all to learn about our islands resources and its potential, and also the pitfalls, and not allow it to fall into a greed modality and only allow the development of our resources on a sustainable footing. We must realize that many overseas nations are eyeing our resources, and if we are not careful about how we borrow funds from international lenders, including bilateral funding, then we may end up in a losing position where we would be forced to sell our most valuable resources to square off the debt.
We have the next generation energy producing Thorium on our island. We have rare earths that so sought after for advanced components. We have titanium which is the bedrock of the whitening element in the paint industry, not to mention the more obvious light but strong metals industry. We have graphite that would increase the energy storage capacity of electricity in batteries. We have fresh water supplies in abundance if we protect our watersheds in the central highlands. We have enough undiscovered medicines and pharmaceutical potential in our soils and biodiversity rich oceans and forests. We are geographically located in a unique way and potentially control a sealanes chokepoint. We can hide nuclear submarines in our deep ocean canyons to develop our own defense to ensure security. We have phosphates, which is the most valuable fertilizer input that the more populous nations like China, USA, India and others are after. We need to realize that having these resources is both a blessing and a curse. Certain nations are piling on the debt and are happy to lend to us billions more in order to force us to repay back those loans with our resources. Beware.

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