Dear Editor,
On the very day of Hugo Chavez’s death I saw an interview with him on the BBC programme ‘Hard Talk’ with Stephen Sackur. As usual Mr. Sackur didn’t beat around the bush, he was forthright and shot him some loaded questions to which Chavez was nimble in his response with such aplomb, effervescence and a conviction so palpable of someone who truly believed in an ideal and the course he was pursuing. At one time you couldn’t avoid noticing how Stephen Sackur was blushing, the admiration in which he regarded him evident; he pursed his lips, shook his head and smiled in a kind of acknowledgement, almost bowled over by Chavez’s clarity of thought, his frankness, the parallels he sighted, his style of reasoning, his cutting wit and logical conclusions. And I am thinking that he will be much remembered for being the first head of state to have visited the U.S.A and at an international forum boldly referred to the President of the U.S.A as a devil. Honestly I was very much impressed with a kind of renewed and revered respect for the late President; I guess we tend to view things in a much different light whenever one dies as we reflect on his/her life. No doubt he was not infallible and certainly not a perfect servant, but he certainly identified with the poor, the suffering masses and on whose interest he expended his energies. If the footage we saw of the reactions of the people from the time of his demise up to the funeral, an entire country of millions taking to the streets, many in tears, is not evidence to go by, then there is none period. He was a man of and for the people, even the US was constrained to pay him obeisance.
But what crossed my mind was the way many of us are fed and made to look and analyse people, situations from a skewed angle and thus a prejudiced outlook. Not having access to a different insight is a dreadful handicap.
How often do we accept hook, line and sinker the most derogatory, despicable, even the most absurd that we are told about people without ever having seen/heard directly from them; their very thoughts, their ideals, principles; from their very lips! And this is what is so unfortunate. Conversely, often the people who are well packaged and presented to us as paragons of virtue are far off mark.
A friend once told me about former U.S.A Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time upbraided her advisor, telling him/her to be careful never to mislead her like that again. According to him (the friend) she was so impressed by Putin’s perspicacious mind to the point of being mesmerised. The late black American leader Malcolm X in his autobiography spoke of sitting on a plane near an elderly white woman who was well at ease all along and even smiled at him until she saw the characteristic “Minister X” written on his brief-case, whereby she almost caught a fit and wanted to move: she never met him, never heard from his lips, all she knew about him was what was fashioned by the establishment which demonised him. I saw on “America’s Got Talent” a contestant who said he worked on a farm as a chicken catcher, to which the judges were all amused; the way he dressed, the way he spoke, the way he looked- his mannerism made the judges all dismiss him before he sang a single word! They saw him as being funny. But when he began, from the very first word to the end of his song you could have heard a pin drop!
Everyone-judges all were stunned beyond belief, mystified which the judges unashamedly openly admitted, owning up to their prejudging of him. Talk about judging a book by its cover!
And this is what not having a view from the other side, not being predisposed to the other side of the coin invariably does to us; hinder us from making sound, fair, informed judgement.
But I guess this human failing is as perennial as the grass.
Yours faithfully,
Frank Fyffe
