I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you are not your address. You are not your education. You are not your job title. You are not your bank balance.

After an ill-advised peek into the comment sections of a particular news story this morning, I figured it was worth saying.

The vast majority of those of us who work in the capital city, the country’s major commercial hub, do not live in the capital city. The capital city itself is located at the entrance to the northwest peninsula and has essentially two points of entrance/exit. It is therefore unsurprising that the daily commute in and out of the capital city is an ordeal under the best of circumstances. In the event of rain, it’s a true trial. On occasions when the residents of the communities bordering the sole highway in or out decide to stage a protest on said highway, it’s outright torture.

Over the years spent driving to and from Port of Spain, I can recall being stuck on the wrong side of protest action at least twice. Once, I was on my way to pick up my daughter after work and had to call her sitter and explain the situation (once I figured out what was even happening), then call her dad (who had fortunately escaped the gridlock) and ask him to pick her up and keep her until I made it through. Three hours later, exhausted and low on gas, I picked her up, got her home, fed her, went over her homework, got her bathed and into bed.

It was an awful evening. The worst thing about it was that I never knew when it would happen again.

As I sat there on the highway with my car in park, windows up with the air conditioning on, listening to the radio and hoping to hear that the road had been cleared, I thought about how unfair it was that, after a long, tiring day at work, I was stuck in absolute gridlock with no idea of when I’d be able to get home to my child. I thought about how often communities and organisations resorted to holding ordinary citizens hostage in order to get the attention of or force action from those responsible for running this country. And I thought about how willing we ordinary citizens were to turn a blind eye to what was happening to other ordinary citizens so long as it didn’t inconvenience us.

These thoughts weren’t revelatory when I had them. Back when I first returned to this country, I was surprised to learn that, not only do we have a dump next to our capital city, but we have communities living across from and adjacent to that dump. I’ve never been able to drive that stretch of highway, rolling up my window to avoid the smell, smoke and dust, without wondering why we’re ok with this and what we expect to be the result of it.

It was abundantly clear to me then that we prefer the communities of Beetham and Sea Lots to be invisible. We don’t much care that they’re suffering, so long as they do it in silence. This only became clearer when our leaders, in preparation for the arrival of foreign dignitaries, decided the best thing to do about the existence of these communities was to build a literal wall to hide them from the lofty eyes of our visitors. If our complete disregard for those communities was that apparent to me, how apparent must it have been to the people living there? And for how long must it have been glaringly obvious?

Our attitude towards those communities and all the other so-called “hotspots” hasn’t changed in the intervening years. They know that, too, because we make no secret of it. Whether they’re protesting extrajudicial police killings or roads that are literally caving in, if they inconvenience the general public, we have all the smoke for them and next to none for the politicians that are clearly quite comfortable failing to serve the people who vote them into their comfortable publicly-funded paychecks. That tendency is precisely why the politicians feel safe ignoring the ongoing suffering of their constituents.

And so the wheel turns.

This morning’s protest was reportedly inspired by months of exposure to raw sewage. As if the usual dump fumes aren’t bad enough. The MP responsible for addressing this is the same one who was chased out of the community in the wake of flooding back in 2018. One of the individuals who were eventually charged in that incident can be seen here on video explaining the frustration that led the community to take action today.

Ironically, many of the replies to that video only serve to reinforce why creating inconvenience for the general public might be the only way they can be heard:

If this is how we feel about our fellow citizens, why should they feel any way at all about suffering our morning commute after being continuously ignored by the people pocketing public funds to serve them? Imagine watching human beings talk about living with sewage for months and deciding that the answer is to “build a wall” (which, again, we’ve already done) or ship them off to another island.

Now imagine being the public servants who fell down on the job hard enough to allow things to get this bad and reading these reactions. Then study why your roads are so bad, why WASA can get away with charging you for water you don’t actually receive (unless they’re sending mauby and telling you it’s safe to drink) and why you have to brace for tone (at best) every time you set foot into a government office to access the services to which you are entitled.

The truth we conveniently ignore as we roll up our windows and roll down the Beetham Highway — the truth we use our addresses, degrees, job titles and, if we’re lucky, assets to hide from — is that the gap between us and the people we like to look down on is A LOT smaller than the gap between us and the people who are supposed to be serving us. One of the many things we should have learned from this pandemic by now is that the vast majority of us are only a few paychecks, a few bills and maybe a medical emergency away from being the very people we love to despise.

It should be obvious that the fix for that is not to despise them harder, especially when we can clearly see the many ways those tasked with serving our interests are failing to do so on a daily basis.

The fix is to finally recognise that the people we like to refer to as “dem” are indeed us. And all of us deserve to be treated with respect. We all deserve to live in communities with functioning infrastructure and to have access to due process (as opposed to summary execution) because those are the marks of a healthy society.

It really is that simple.

We just like to make it hard.