So I’m sitting here in the wake of the 2023 National Budget Statement, trying to figure out how drive my daughter to and from school outside of peak traffic hours per the Prime Minister’s advice, right? And the thought occurs to me: Maybe I’ve been looking at the state of Trinidad and Tobago all wrong.

All this anxiety over the inevitable effects of rising fuel costs will only drive my blood pressure up alongside the skyrocketing food prices. Lord knows I don’t want to add a doctor’s visit to my list of bills, so why fret? 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.

I bet it’s so much nicer there. I bet, in their world, rising fuel prices really are just the sign they were waiting for to buy a more fuel-efficient tax-exempt luxury vehicle. We can’t blame them for being out of touch with the world in which the rest of us live, nor should we be jealous of their good fortune. Instead, we should follow their example and imagine a better world for ourselves.

For example, in my own personal La-La Land, obvious facts would be obvious—like, say, the way power derives from the consent of the governed—and we’d operate based on those facts. In this fictional world, if we felt like the folks in charge were making a lot of excuses for the way things are instead of taking advantage of obvious opportunities to ease the pain, we’d stimulate their empathy by helping them to truly understand that pain. ‘Cause we’re nice like that, you know?

How would we do that? Well, you see, in my world, we have something called the…

La-La Land Laws

1. Parliament operates from 8am-4pm, Monday to Friday and flashing lights and bus route passes are only for emergency and public transport services.
2. No one can be a Member of Parliament and a Government Minister (because who can effectively serve the interests of an entire constituency and an entire nation at the same time?) and they all have annual KPI assessments specific to their portfolios. All MPs have to live in the constituencies they represent and split their time evenly between their constituency offices and the Parliament.
3. The Minister of Works and Transport has to live in the community with the worst roads south of Chaguanas. No transport-related allowances for this Minister and they have to use a form of public transportation at least three times per workweek.
4. The Minister of Public Utilities has to live among the 66% of the population that doesn’t receive a 24/7 pipe-borne water supply. Preferably in an area that never receives pipe-borne water and the residents are forced to pay for truck-borne supplies of it.
5. The Minister of Labour and the Minimum Wages Board have to prove that they can personally survive on the minimum wage.
6. Culture and Tourism are no longer part of a single Ministry (because whose idea was that in the first place?) and each Minister is required to have direct professional experience in the respective portfolio and a meaningful five-year development plan for the sector before assuming office.
7. The Housing Minister has to live in the most dilapidated government housing scheme.
8. The for-profit healthcare system is a thing of the past. The Ministry of Health is responsible for ensuring that every citizen in need of medical treatment can receive timely care within our “free” healthcare system, or finding the funding for them to get it wherever it is available.
9. Private and denominational schools no longer exist (Concordat? What’s that?), the SEA is MIA, students are zoned and all schools receive public funds in direct proportion to the size of their student body. Schools that admit special-needs children receive the extra training and funding required to support them. The formerly-mysterious Learning Materials Evaluation Committee is now a super-transparent body with abundantly clear criteria for ensuring that students have access to quality textbooks at reasonable prices. (I could go on all day with this one.)
10. Every cent contributed to a political party has to be publicly accounted for and every financier has to register as such, which requires revealing their sources of income.

Obviously, fewer people are jockeying for power in La-La Land because it’s clear that (as the late, great Uncle Ben said) it comes with a full side order of responsibility. Plus, those that do decide to take up the mantle get to experience the importance of their portfolio first-hand. AAAAAND, we all have a vested interest in ensuring that things run smoothly because we’re not banking on securing our own bag/healthcare/education at the expense of everyone else.

It’s nice in my own little world. From here, you can’t even hear it when the people least likely to feel the effects of our woefully undiversified economy tell our most vulnerable citizens to suck it up (as if they haven’t been sucking it up for years).

Things make sense here. I think you’d like it here.

You’re welcome to join me.