TSUNAMIS AND POLITICAL
TSUNAMIS
It is eight years from the day the Boxing Day tsunami
struck, and many Sri Lankans though they remember, do not
particularly want to reminisce about the death and destruction
caused by those deathly waves. But, it's the upside of the
aftermath of this calamity that has to be remembered, to capture
a little bit of the spirit of what we as a country could
achieve.
Years after the tsunami, it's a blip in the memories of many
people, precisely because there was nothing that could break the
sprit of battered but indomitable Sri Lankans. Our tsunami
recovery effort though certainly not without the inevitable
downsides, compared favorably for instance with the way the
world's only superpower reacted to hurricane Katrina for
instance, not many years after the 2004 Boxing Day calamity.
Natural calamities of this order were not the lot of Sri
Lankans before the tsunami, even though annual floods etc.,
routinely take some lives in this very tropical of islands. The
predictions therefore were dire. The experts said that it will
take this country decades to recover from the affects of
nature's carnage, but yet the rehabilitation effort was
relatively swift, and efficiently executed.
This sealed our credentials as a resilient nation. Five years
later, our gallant, never say die forces were able to rid us of
the scourge of terrorism. Political tsunamis, terrorist
tsunamis, and real tsunamis -- Sri Lankans have proved
themselves to be more than adept at meeting all of these
challenges with a resilience that is spunky, irreverent and
famously indomitable.
It's why those who are waiting for a political tsunami to
ravage the country, should perish that thought early, as there
is no chance that a country that emerged intact from the tsunami
waves and vanquished some of the worst merchants of terror that
the world has ever known, will succumb to some cheap political
theatre performed by a club of snake-oil salesmen of the NGO and
civil society persuasion.
These people are full of cliches these days, some going to
the extent of claming in their columns that masquerade as
impendent commentaries, that there is an 'increasingly angry and
mutinous populace' against the leadership of the country's
resurgent post-war development effort.
These people would wish for another tsunami, if it means that
they could accomplish their maniacal, outlandish wish for regime
change. But the Sri Lankans have never been more ready for any
calamity -- natural or man made.
From one perspective, natural calamities even in the order of
major occurrences such as tsunamis are nothing compared to the
diabolical designs that foreign funded NGO types and their
handmaidens, the so called civil society sentinels have for this
country. They will want to wreak havoc at the best of times, and
though a tsunami will strike once in a millennium, these people
are poised to strike any time it is convenient.
Now they are hopeful that the waves of an impeachment tsunami
will leave the nation desolate, so that they could unleash the
vultures on the carrion that's left behind. Hope wells
eternally, they say, but it is beyond clear now that all the hot
air about the impeachment is totally disingenuous in terms of
substance, and wholly trumped up in terms of possible impact.
Already, the waves of this imagined tsunami are beating back,
and though the receding waves were the most dangerous in the
Boxing Day tsunami, the returning waves of the 'impeachment
tsunami' expose the true natures of its instigators. That they
all accept that there are glaring integrity issues with regard
to the Chief Justice, has not stopped them from maintaining that
the impeachment is some sort of a governance calamity that
signals the end of democracy, or some such thing they can't help
but keep parroting ...
Cynical though it may sound, as far as destruction goes,
nature does a better job. The tsunami advanced on us stealthily.
But, these political tsunamis are so flagrant that the designs
of the authors of such diabolical projects are obvious from the
outset. Their partisan motives are red-flagged from the
beginning - it's what's called in common parlance a dead give
away. For a country that weathered a deathly, stealthy tsunami,
facing a barefaced thin-skinned political campaign of subversion
of this order is slim pickings indeed ...
|