opinion

Going back to Colon, and looking back on a life
by Raymond Grant

Understanding and explaining myself through an analytical look at my objectives, coupled with a culture of learning, sharing and persuading myself and others to action, is now as important to me as having attained retirement status from the United States Armed Forces.

At the beginning of the century, I was at a major university doing research about the history of the Panama Canal. While there, one of the university’s faculty members, familiar with the Panama Canal’s history, shared the following with me: “Mr. Grant, I don’t think you are going to find much about the Caribbean man’s perspective about their Panama Canal experience because they were not given to writing down their experiences.”

In my opinion, "a life without examination and revelation is not worth living.” (Socrates). Contrary to those of us who believe that cultural manifestation should be limited to the familiar traditions and activities, Mr. Carlos Chambers’s personal statement published in the last edition of “El Noticiero Popular, stands as a recipe for change.

Today I still remember the submarine drama movie, “Crimson Tide,” starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman.

In the movie, Gene Hackman, the commander of the ship, instituted a war drill while the ship was on fire. Denzel, the second in command, questioned the commander’s decision to institute a drill while he and other troops where trying to contain the fire. The commander’s reply was simply this: “Captain, you seem to believe that a call to war will only occur under a ship’s normal operating conditions. I beg to differ. My calling the war drill while the fire was in effect, is my way of training the troops to operate under multiple challenges.” Amongst other things, the commander told Denzel to SHUT THE ^%@& UP.

Likewise, in a world of often adverse interests, philosophy provides each one of us with a methodology appropriate for investigating the meaning of life and the fundamental problems related to human existence. For me, that piece of literature carries the title of “The Willie Lynch letter and the making of a slave.”

Most of my career has been in the information technology (IT) field. Like in the past, today I find myself performing the more often than not difficult task of determining the pattern and source of network-related problems. In doing so, I have also learned that if you don’t have the proper background and motivation to tackle the problem, more often than not, you would hardly do anything to attain its resolution.

Since the beginning of the XXI century, several of my opinion articles have been published in the Panamanian press, for to forsake that obligation and/or responsibility, would have denied me a contribution to the written and oral history we each owe our children and their generation.

One such article reminded me of the Crimson Tide movie scene I described earlier. The article was about an upcoming Carnival and about a Black Ethnicity Museum which was proposed for the city of Colon a year before the said carnival, pending identification of funding sources.

This past November, I was in Colon and I did not see any signs of work being done at the proposed site for the museum, nor did I learn of any funding source(s) for the project. Yet, plans are already underway for the upcoming 2008 Carnival celebration.

One philosopher stated that “A mind must be asleep if it shows no interest in learning how its thinking pattern works.” In my opinion, if it was for the traditional Carnival celebrations, Colon would have already secured additional funding to help build its Black Ethnicity Museum with the support of (Afro-Panamanians) living at home and abroad, and who will be participating in the 2008 Carnival celebrations.

The author works for the Department of Justice in Washington, DC