As I watch the story of the POSGH NICU bacterial outbreak unfold, I wonder if we might be on the verge of remembering the power of solidarity.
What kind of person looks at a video of terrified children being shushed by their, no doubt, equally terrified teacher as gunshots ring out nearby and calls it “quite misleading”?
I wonder if we’ll ever get around to envisioning an approach to addressing our spiralling crime rate that doesn’t amount to cheering for extrajudicial killers.
Trinidad and Tobago is having a tough time right now. The world is slipping into a recession, COVID refuses to acknowledge our collective efforts to pretend it doesn’t exist, and our government is besieged by a combination of microphone malfunctions and an “irritated” population.
The more I listen to certain government ministers and their defenders, the more I realise that a lot of people have never stopped to wonder about their purpose. Naturally, these government ministers are relying on this lack of curiosity to get away with the bare foolishness they say and do. So long as it never crosses our mind to consider why we employ a group of representatives or how they should be representing us, they can do as they please. Which, of course, is precisely what many of them are doing.
Instead of blinged-out TD Jakes and Creflo Dolla telling us that we can get like them if we give them all we’ve got, we have a growing cast of well-fed characters working overtime to convince us that to sacrifice is noble and to starve is divine.
Lately, it seems like the politicians are firing shots at their own people—scoring own goals, if you will—and I’ve begun to wonder who they’re actually speaking to.
Surely my time and energy would be better spent trying to figure out how to migrate to the kind of fantasy world populated by T&T’s people of means and influence. Only there could a person be so invested in maintaining business (and traffic) as usual that they’d completely ignore the fact that we just spent two years proving that a national work-from-home policy is possible.