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AT
LAST, MAURICE AND THE AIRPORT ARE RE-UNITED
The Point Salines
International Airport was officially opened
in October 1984,just one year following the
demise of the Grenada
Revolution and the brutal executions of
Maurice Bishop and others. Today, 26 years
in the wake of the bloody events of October
1983,
the airport and its most
celebrated poet- Maurice Bishop- will be
re-united.
Let us remember that the idea
of naming the airport for Maurice started
with Terry Marryshow and the Maurice Bishop
Patriotic Movement (MPBM) in 1985:
Marryshow’s pioneering toil must be
acknowledged.
Naming the airport for
Maurice Bishop is not the same as turning
him into a saint; nor is it an attempt to
put him in a place beyond reproach.
Maurice was very human and
being human meant he could make mistakes;
and he did. Being human ourselves, we do
not hold up Maurice’s imperfections as a
valid reason to deny him the honour that is
truly his: we will never have human heroes
and sheroes if such honours were open only
to the unblemished.
Some of our compatriots are
opposed to the idea of naming
the airport for Maurice. We
must be careful not to make light of their
dissent. We must never deny the sincerity
and the earnestness of their stated
objections.
We must remind ourselves that
much healing could happen if we remained
sensitive to opinions expressed by Lloyd
Noel, Andrew Bierzynski and others: The
musician with a keen ear makes harmony out
of dissonance.
Martin P. Felix does have a
keen ear and it is why he took the
time to write a little book
around which we can celebrate what is a very
teachable moment in our history. First
published in 1998 (under the auspices of the
Grenada Forum, New York), Felix’s “Maurice
Bishop International Airport” is
a sensitive contribution to
our continuing search for comity
and consensus.
The ruling NDC Government
deserves our thanks for showing courage on
this issue; we believe it is a good thing
for
Grenada that the opposition
NNP also backs the renaming of the airport.
Let us all look ahead to building on this
rare show of bi-partisanship.
One love,
Sue Patrice and Caldwell
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