Here every Creed and Race finds an Equal Place.. (but the more money you have the more Equal your Place)

I wrote a note on a Sunday that elicited a mixed bag of responses from the energized to the desperate, and I realized how polarized we as a people are becoming as we grapple with the day to day stress of managing our lives, dealing with the horror show that is the evening news, and the frustration and disgust at the political comedians currently passing off as government and leadership.

First off I feel the need to make my own position clear. so you know my biases

I am a Trinidadian through and true and this will always be my first choice to call home.

I had the unique opportunity/advantage of growing up in Woodbrook in the late 70’s, early 80's, and this opportunity bred in me a love of family and 'neighbors as family'; the concept that a community protects, loves, serves and cherishes its members and gives them a place to belong to, and a social conscience born in an environment where race and class had no dividing quality, our differences made us all unique and equal.
I literally got my ass cut houses away from my home for using ‘bad language’, and I have had hot dinners in so many homes I couldn’t count if I tried.
That community experience had left me ill prepared for Trinidad of the New Millennium, where every institution seemed hell bent on escaping from itself.
Don’t get me wrong, crime has adjusted my choices as well, but I think both economics and business together are using fear as a catalyst for driving the exact recipe that is causing crime in the first place – the systematic dismantling of our communities.

We are left seeking identities in what we have rather than in who we are, what we belong to rather than where we come from.
This is empty identity, valueless, and will be for nothing if your fortunes or your health fail you. This is precisely where community steps in and takes over.

I am still blessed to have a strong community of friends and family who I love and cherish dearly.
Those of you who don’t know, on October the 10th of 2008 I was involved in a terrible accident that left me requiring multiple surgeries to my right arm, and incapacitated for almost six of months and required extensive physical therapy.
The moment that accident happened, my illusion of control died.
I saw the people in my life take control of the simplest things that kept my world together, and cared for me when all my important stuff were, for all intents and purposes, indefinitely cancelled.
That accident brought home to me once again how important my community is to my survival, and how little I really understood about what is real and what is make believe. I know I will never take them for granted again.
I only bring this up to make a point. As is said in ‘The Jungle Book’ – the strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf’.
Try not to lose this web of love and care as you reach for the big house and the fancy car; by all means be ambitious, but don’t stray to far from the pack for, if you’re unlucky enough to have all your plans spill violently out onto a Barataria road in the wee hours of the morning, who will be there to pick you up, to protect you, care for you, harass the doctors (my friends and family had St. Clair Medical Centre on their toes,) stay with you, help you mend, and then go about as if nothing has happened and no debt is owed?
We build international schools and separate and segregate the children by class. Do we think the other children will raise themselves wanting to love us anyway?
We build movie Cineplex’s that cater to our egos and make us feel like little Gods as they pander to us for profit, but what of the ones who can't afford it?
What is to become of the ones in our community who don’t share our fortune, who become the ones left behind?
What are they to become?
Our fans?
Our followers?
Our peasants?
Is the God complex worth the wrought iron bars on our doors and windows, paid security and body guards?
Honestly, I miss fighting to get to Globe on a Sunday in time for a ‘good’ seat.
I miss hearing the people in ‘pit’ shouting at the screen in this sanitized, Americanized version of sweet T&T.
I miss the Trinidad where no one messed with you because, well you were them and they were you, all of us part of one big, ketch-ass, easy going community.
We may have better stuff now, but we don’t have a better life.
We lost people along the way, deliberately left them behind, and that is the demon seed all our problems are growing from.
We are still a dot.
We can still be a community; we just need the will to stop buying into the advertisers bullshit.
We are not little Gods, Superstars or Supermodels; we just play one in real life.
If my stuff ever tried to keep me from my tribe, then feel free to have my stuff.
I KNOW what matters in the real world, and I bless God for the opportunity to say this.
You are a Trinidadian, love yourself and the people that fate, destiny, God, and the Universe has put into your life.
They define you, protect you and make you valid. They make you real.
Never lose sight of that, or you may find yourself alone, and all the stuff in the world isn’t worth that.
When we’re a community again, when we’re a national family again, all these tin pot dictators and wanna be gangsters will fade away.
I am SURE of it.