TT’s crumbling cake

Look, you can’t tell me we are not living in a State like no other worldwide, so incomprehensible, so like the interior life of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character, so steeped in magical realism that you will be forgiven if in your waking hours you believe you are dreaming and while you sleep you think you’re living your best or worst life depending on whether or not it was a good dream or a nightmare. I’ve written over 800,000 words about this place and when I stop I would have not even begun. Two decades I’ve not run out of things to say about this tiny twin-island town.

The thing is you can’t pin down this place. One minute you feel handcuffed. Yes. That’s how we feel. Most citizens. It’s a small village we live in. Mostly, it’s the law of the jungle.

Everyone is behind bars, in offices, and homes and prisoners are safer than free citizens as they have maximum security and even they can bust out. Not us. This is the place where the big fish eat the little fish. Similar to global demographics.

The world’s richest one per cent, own 45 per cent of the world’s wealth. Look at it like a cake. On the top, there is the buttery, creamy, sugary cadre of people who own the country by virtue of owning the Treasury. Let’s call them the Government. They have control over 70 per cent of the cake by virtue of being the largest employer in the country.

Just beneath them, but not by much are the captains of industry, swirls of oligopolies, a little monopoly here and there. They employ about 30 per cent of us and own most of the country.

Beneath them, the professionals.

Engineers. Lawyers, Doctors. Accountants. Academics. Managers. The ones that have not scooted out for fear of being bludgeoned to death at a traffic light or in their beds. You’re looking at the shrinking middle class.

Go down further where the majority live. Maybe you’re just left with flour and a bit of water in a drought. This non-cake without butter, sugar, and eggs represents shrinking access to basic human rights—education, housing, safety, food, clean drinking water, travel.

I know we are a magical country, complex, an island made up with strands of all continents, a globe in miniature. How? Because like you, daily I see both sides of it, the sacred and profane.

What makes it worthwhile is the jokey way people survive, by their wits, so you get the story of the man who ate in KFC for an entire year pretending to be from “head office” without being detected.

Look at the cake topping. What you will find is a lack of access. Walls of fear. The air is rare there. There is no redress for 70 per cent of our people.

You could get cut down hard. Lose everything even if you venture to that place. Go lower. Business. Almost as bad. Anything could lose you your job, your mortgage.

Go even lower. Professionals. They could screw you over or not depending on how desperate you are for help. This week alone, in a private medical facility, for a family member admitted with dehydration with his doctor’s note, this happened.

A ‘specialist’ walked in unannounced, unexpected, and uninvited. He said, “You should stay the night.” But first, we had to pay. The bill was $18,000 for some saline solution and anti-nausea medication. For the suggestion that we should spend the night we paid his fee of $1,200. (We didn’t stay).

He said we should have been told that was his price. (Nobody told us). That same week, a doctor in a government hospital sat us down and gave us some lifesaving advice for free.

There are people in the top layers with all the power. No one can touch them now. But one walk through a public health facility is sobering. People of all ages, colours, and sizes, facing death. We will all get there.

We will all be vulnerable sometime, someday. Even the people at the top. I used to think we lacked agency, lacked power as a people.

We all have it. Some exercise it to exploit and others to uplift. We must, each of us, make a decision, no matter where we are in the cake, on how we can exercise the power we have over others, knowing, in the end, our only legacy will be how we transformed or ruined the lives of the people around us.