Dear local elections candidates
Local Government Elections are on August 14, and you will be nominated on June 26. So it begins, the rallies and walkabouts, your sitting on raised stages with plastic water bottles, looking out at the helpless audiences before you. You may predict disaster if people vote ‘for the other side’ and sleep easy thinking of power and perks. That’s the hustle. I’m sure most of you are not grieving over the daily dead, the thousands falling into the underbelly of society, struggling to live.
I think of my friend and journalist, the late Raoul Pantin, who quit smoking when his lungs were collapsing by looking straight at a lit cigarette with a **** Y** and never lit one again. He died with PTSD illness and a broken heart for the country he loved, a country he nearly died for with the barrel of a gun to his skull for six days of the attempted coup of 1990.
When I get that jaded feeling, I hear him, “Mathur, tell them not to **** with the people.” I would reply, “Raoul, that top spin in mud so many times. I’m jaded.”
“Look, Mathur,” he would reply, “Do the people’s work. Rage into the dying of the light.” I called up another journalist who, like Raoul, risked his life for this country. Dennis McComie barricaded the doors of Radio 610 in 1990 against insurgents and was the nation’s voice during the media blackout, keeping democracy alive until the reprieve. McComie, who was named the Express Individual of the Year in 1990, is still suffering from PTSD, still unrecompensed, still a patriot, observing and quietly despairing for our country. I’ll let McComie speak for us all. “In the last years of Raoul’s life (like most survivors in the line of fire, including parliamentarians like Jennifer Johnson, who died in February 2023) Raoul was utterly destroyed mentally, emotionally, economically, and ignored by the State. Everyone retreated. Administrations have not publicly addressed that event. It is not in our history books. People under 33 know nothing of it. They don’t understand why we live in a culture of death and indifference.
“1990 traumatised every citizen, even if you were home safe. There was no healing. It has got much worse. 1990 started the influx of arms, ammunition, and drugs. Now we are all screaming, shouting at one another. Are we listening to one another? We don’t respect consensus. We are not communicating. Human needs, shelter, food, safety and health are unmet. People are shouting and killing as citizens are panicking and breaking down. It feels as if our defence was for nothing.
“When I was going to work on July 27, 1990, a taxi driver told me people were being violent with one another over small things. Today is an echo of that violence but worse. Since then, many more guns have been used to kill people. If you are walking on the wrong road, you could get shot. That one event has turned into a daily occurrence. We have disintegrated. There is no respect for one another. We’ve forgotten the sacredness of life and the value of peace. “The mortal coil absorbs the trauma, and you try to survive, affecting all of us in terrible ways. If we decide to remain people of denial, the wound will fester, and we will continue to suffer trauma, continue to shout at one another, and kill instead of communicating.
“When candidates get elected, we get hubris, arrogance, greed, lies, corruption, and ego. Can they see their goal not as power but as a sacred duty to be above board, understand they are paid to govern, uphold institutions, and govern with goodness? Do they want to be like bandits who wish for what others have, or do they like to restore healing in a country where blood is shed regularly?
“We are busy trying to pay bills and absorbed with our anger with others. We will implode if we don’t change. We must think of who we are, and how we feel about shared civic values, cultures, and diversity, and ask ourselves if we care about T&T’s natural and built heritage.
“We must push past that to become authentic citizens to erase this culture of death and indifference. If you are given responsibilities at any level, as a politician or citizen, you must be held to account, and if not in this mortal world, the universe will take its due. We must seek truth and beauty in all we do.”
Truth and beauty in all we do. An ideal, yes, but the only weapon there is against death and indifference. And yes, as Raoul Pantin would have said, Don’t **** with the people. Also. Learn from history. You have the power. Use it for a nation that has taken a beating over decades.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023