The Price of Freedom... (Until all are free, none are free)

“This is about more than holding elections – it’s also about what happens between them. Repression takes many forms, and too many nations are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty.

No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers.

No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt.

No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.

 In the 21st century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success – strong parliaments and honest police forces; independent judges and journalists; a vibrant private sector and civil society.

Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in peoples’ lives.”

Excerpt from a speech by President Barack Obama to the Parliament in Ghana, July 10th 2009

He may well have been speaking to Trinidad & Tobago

Since that speech was made we have had two elections with change sweeping through Parties and change sweeping through the corridors of power, but tell me, after all that change, what has really changed?

Token gifts and grand nothing gestures made to distract with shiny things continue while the carnage on our streets and highways continue unabated; where mothers and babies go to our medical institutions to die from neglect and apparent malpractice; where our young men are killing each other at the behest of the faceless crime lords who still wield power despite our changes; is this change?

Our people, heirs to slavery and indentureship believe themselves free because the shackles that bound their hands and feet have been removed; unable to see the shackles that binds their minds they fight each other into poverty and squander the crumbs left on the floor as they hold on to words and concepts and throw them around at each other, the intellectual, the educated and the unenlightened alike, while the street runs red with black blood that, despite how politically incorrect black has become, is still wet and red.

Respect for the living long gone, respect for the dead becoming a memory as we battle each other to hold onto air, nothing but empty air while the treasure of our nation is looted and exploited in rooms we can neither enter nor exit without permission on soil we have the audacity to call our own.

Our freedom is an illusion that we defend with grand ideas, visions and plans, never stopping to see that all of our high sounding words makes us circus animals jumping through hoops that are pleasing to our ears and those that would call us trained but does nothing to change the rampaging ills of society and, one hundred and fifty years later, the lash still falls whataap!

Independence was a great illusion designed not to free us but to release us to our own devices even while the plunder continued unabated. Our social systems disconnected from the Monarchy left us adrift and, as is the nature of the colonized, at each other's throats.

Tell me again what has really changed.

Massa, Jim Crow and the King are gone, how come black people still living in ghettos and shanties and suffering like dogs to get through the day?

If we free, why does it feel like  we have no say in anything important?

For freedom to come shouldn't ALL of our people be free and feel free?

For change to come nothing that is wrong must remain while all that is right must become our agenda and our status quo, not so?

There will never be change or freedom while the high blacks piss down on the low blacks deluding themselves with the idiocy that these people chose this suffering for themselves;  personally I would like to know if that is what they chose, what were the other choices?

The foolish accept and parrot the insipidness carried by the insipid, and we the people duck and run for cover when night starts to fall.

Only when Laventille and Westmoorings children are equally safe in their beds at night will change come.

Only when all people stand before all systems and institutions of this land as equals and citizens can all say we are free.

Until then we are worse than fools, because we are using our advantages to keep our own selves in bondage, foolishly thinking that even though our brother is suffering we can still call ourselves free.

The future of our nation demands that all of our people are free, anything less is unacceptable.