Status Quo: Bad, But Not That Bad
Cinnamon Lakeside, yesterday
I think Mahinda Rajapaksa won the Presidency. Fonseka has real legal concerns about the election, but it was free and fair enough for most observers. So now what? Me, I have to go to the bank and go get a wedding present. See, through all the seeming chaos, Sri Lanka actually runs fine. That is in many ways the paradox of the place. Sometimes it looks like the wheels are falling off but they never do. Unlike the days of insurrection (both Sinhala and Tamil) I think we are thankfully entering an age of political rather than visceral absurdity. I mean visceral as in blood and guts. This sucks, but significantly less than it used to.
I say this because all the international attention is of a rather bad sort. As in, ‘will my hotel get surrounded by troops, I’d rather go to India (but not the Taj), or Thailand (but then the airport), then Florida’. I think the siege was wrong, but it was never dangerous to guests. If anything, it was entertaining. While the election is a travesty of intimidation and abuse, it was nothing like the days where the JVP threatened to kill people who voted, and did.
This is not to excuse anything. It’s a bit like saying I’m sorry I punched you in the face but at least I didn’t stab you. I mean, it’s still not kosher. I think the election was unfree and unfair, but it will stand. I think Fonseka’s complaints of abuse, intimidation and vote rigging are true and that the Constitution should be legally binding, but people don’t care. So you get 6 more years of Mahinda, or 8 if he wants to bend the law a whole lot more (and why not).
So that’s what it is. It sucks, but it’s a 21st century kinda horrid, not the carnage in the streets of before. It’s not good, but it’s not that bad. This is, I think, the modern condition.
And yet, UNP went to bed with the JVP. !!!
And MR is in bed with Pillayan and Karuna… :)
Suresh, these are cheap comments, but they’re just that – cheap and worthless.
First, given all the suffering caused by the long LTTE conflict, if there was a chance to bring that to an end faster, wouldn’t any democratic government be not only idiotic but also utterly irresponsible to refuse to make deals to split the terrorists? This is exactly what the USA did in Iraq – make deals and in the end give guns to the more reconcilable elements of the Al-Qaeda/Sunni insurgents who had been fighting the USA, and what it now proposes to with “moderate” Taliban in Afghanistan. It’s also what the UNP was more than willing to do with the JVP in 1989, and then later with the LTTE in 1990 (Premadasa did offer the north to the LTTE without elections for a decade if they had at least accepted the idea of eventually having elections). Second, the deals that were made with Karuna and co did help to bring the war to an end and peace to those living in the east. So how does Suresh think this could have been done without making some kind of deal to give them them some stake in power, and carrying through on that commitment at least in the immediate transition period?
But didnt make a baby.
LMAO, the best comment eva! Made my day…
“See, through all the seeming chaos, Sri Lanka actually runs fine. That is in many ways the paradox of the place”
Whats ‘fine’? If it means we can get up every morning and go to work and come back home again without the chance of being blown up by a bomb, yes, sure. But what if its about economic development, about access to affordable health care, about seeing your hard earned tax rupees actually going into developing the country and not into someone’s pocket? Too many of us work damn hard every day and have so little to show for it, its a virtual hand to mouth existence and will be so unless the country develops in a way that benefits us all – not just the chosen few!
“unless the country develops in a way that benefits us all – not just the chosen few!”
If that is going to happen then it’s critical that Sri Lanka function as a democracy accountable to the majority of its people. On that issue, despite all its current and continuing shortcomings, the biggest threats that Sr iLanka’s democracy has faced in recent decades has been from the JVP which twice tried to violently overthrow it (and came pretty close both times), and the LTTE whose whole modus operandi was the violent rejection of democratic process and democratic Tamil dissent (most of which it murdered). Both of those threats have consumed the country for 38 years – with us living under emergency rule most of that. We can’t just forget all that and all the dead, and pretend that it never happened. That was an objective reality that was definitely far less fine than what we have now.
Only because both the LTTE and JVP are now firmly defeated (JVP by UNPs’ Premadasa, LTTE by SLFP’s Rajapaksa), can we now have a better status quo. It may not be perfect, but at least we now can work on improving that in a more normal environment.
And what makes you think the situation is any different elsewhere in the world? With all your moaning and groaning, you’d still be living much worse than a hand to mouth existence in the USA or UK unless you were in the very top 10% income bracket. If you can’t afford private healthcare (whose cost is peanuts compared to health insurance that you probably never even use if you lived in the USA, or the exorbitant rates charged by private medics elsewhere ), then I have found the Colombo National Hospital to be fairly effective when the doctors are not on strike.
It seems there’s no end to the amount of people in SL who simply keep on griping about how much everything sucks and how there’s no hope, when really, it’s their unwillingness to join together and change things (or worse still, just get up and leave the country) that has kept us down for so long, and let the lowest rungs of society run this country for the past 30 years.
If you’re having so much trouble, what with your hand-to-mouth existence, go find a higher paying job, or find ways to develop your skills so that you can get one. Sell your computer and Internet connection, since it surely whacks a hole in your wallet. If you’re at work, then quit wasting time on the Internet and try and be more productive, who knows, they might give you a raise.
Just for god’s sake, stop whining and wallowing in self pity.
“its a virtual hand to mouth existence”
Yet you can afford a computer and internet access? Wow.
Add travelling around the world to that..
I think he is speaking figuratively.
“It’s a bit like saying I’m sorry I punched you in the face but at least I didn’t stab you.”
i think this quote explains exactly what indi is doing :-D