Sans humanité
Who says Trinidad is not a real place? The people have shown that it is. Carnival 2023 ended the long guava season of COVID-19 of losing loved ones, incomes, jobs, academic years, and lives to the pandemic. Carnival was the people’s protest, resistance to being crushed as it has always been in the colonies. Calypsonians dealt up name-calling, slave calling, and US sanctions-calling, country-dividing rhetoric. In the tents, they called out the hurt and came down on the side of a united and beautiful country.
The people did in the J’Ouvert dark to belting soca and steelpan, banishing a recent reality of surgical masks, hazmat suits, body bags with fistfuls of clay, mud, paint, grease, glitter, connecting deeply to strangers and lovers.
With every wine, wave and jump, the people pushed past the effects of the shrinking oil-dependent COVID economy, the high food prices, the flooding, the dry taps, the lost jobs, the unmoving traffic, the rising floods, the shocking neglect of infrastructure of roads, drains and utilities, the rotting rusted water pipes, the daily ratatat of murders in the newspapers without any violence.
The people wined away the lowgrade despair that manifests in us sadly being among the most murderous countries in a non-warring nation. We know that has nothing to do with the people. In that madness, we didn’t fear one another, didn’t lock one another out with suspicion…chipped across all divides. By the first golden light of dawn, we were reborn with fresh hearts.
We didn’t fear violence in the mas. There is no ethnic or religious warring. Just desperate people who take and take and can’t take it anymore, gang violence deliberately created by the greed of a few and the desperation of many.
The people know mas is sacred. We didn’t leave our brains behind as we swayed to the music. We know the pandemic shrunk the world economy, and ours is no exception; Our position as a small island state is even more precarious because we don’t produce anything. Our captains of industry don’t manufacture anything.
They get bits from here, bits from there, and assemble goods, depending on supply from other countries. The excuse is the Government has made it too hard to produce coffee, cocoa, sugar, and chocolate in any quantities.
The people accept rising food prices not because it must be that way but because the people on top don’t enable any different.
The people know how to survive Santimanitay. The people have always floated this country. The leaders and captains of industry have lived off the people, wasting the people’s money in investigations into their greed.
That kind of cud chewing never put a plate of food on the people’s table. They take the people’s patience and resilience for granted.
The neglect is criminal. Government ministers and the Opposition who draw the people’s salaries and drive big cars are playing shadowboxing with one another while bullets are killing young people, taps are dry, business is blocked with red tape, banks are not being held accountable, traffic is backing up, and every institution in which government funds have a finger remain sluggish.
When will the ones holding the keys to the people’s treasury have humanity on the people. Stop wasting people’s money on their ego wars. When will they approach governance seriously with transparent goals, budgets, action plans, progress reports, and accountability? The people have rights. T&T is a signatory to the UN Universal Declaration of human rights. (These include civil, political, social, and cultural rights which we have) and economic, social security, health and education rights. When will those on the top stop skimming on their duty of care? Now the Archbishop of Port-of-Spain, Charles Jason Gordon, began the Lenten season saying the people of T&T have a ‘toxic preoccupation’ of ‘running down’ our country that ends up with Trinidad is not a real place. He said Trinidad is real, our people are real, and God lives here.
I would like to add my voice to his and call on all politicians to use this time of reflection to ignite their conscience to do what they are being paid to do, to be accountable to the real people in their care, so people’s human rights aren’t trampled, so that we may stop saying in desperation that Trinidad is not a real place.