The Great Change

Whether anticipated or not, GREAT CHANGE has come! For better or for worse, the people had to accept and embrace it. Some preferred it, while others resisted it with disdain.

Change is most welcome when it turns out to be a necessity, desired by all. Hence change became unavoidable in Russia, China and Cuba, where popular upheavals resulted, which all the citizenry embraced with much relish and hope.

In all those instances change had been a natural process and not something manipulated by interested parties using falsehoods.

It was Goebbels who advanced the theory that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it. The problem with this theory is that, when change is artificially created by applying this theory as the main weapon, it will always boomerang when the real truth is exposed, much anger developing among the general public.

Be that as it may, now that the intended change is established and must be followed, we might as well sit back and “enjoy” the consequences.

When perusing the unnerving incidents which happened after the so-called CHANGE, one might wonder whether Mother Nature herself had taken cudgels against the “Change manipulators”.

For instance, the peaceful life that prevailed around Salawa area was violently shattered due to the ordnance blast at the army camp there, where the change that occurred is still continuing, with so many human beings living in extremely pathetic conditions. That is the change they are experiencing at present.

What about the great change that came about when the Meethotamulla garbage dump disaster struck, which took away precious lives of over 40 human beings? That, too, is another harrowing experience which affected our lives after the “Great Change”.

Then came the tsunami-type flood waters,encompassing half of the island and bringing death and destruction to normal life. This catastrophe, they say, is the curse inflicted upon the island due to the “Great Change”, that forced us to dream of a Utopia!

This mad dream, although bordering on madness and disaster, is not yet over! To make this dream come true there are some more changes to be done. Changes such as selling off important sites and assets to aliens is in the air at the moment.

Natural and man-made disasters together with ill-conceived neo-liberal economic policies will no doubt bring about ultimate catastrophic CHANGE that the pearl of the orient must undergo, after the half-baked change that happened two and half years ago.

Britain’s war-winning Prime Minister Winston Churchill once remarked “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”. The problem is that we are obviously going in the wrong one.

By Vijaya Ariyarathna