After the Glitter Fades... (Post THA)

Every now and then I am forced to wonder if certain people in public life understand what situational awareness means or if they pay any attention at all to the words they say?

Take what took place last Monday as a case in point; humiliated beyond measure by the devastating results in the THA elections, certain persons who purport to speak on behalf of the entire local east indian community have pronounced that, as the results of the election were based solely on race (their estimation) then every Trinidadian of east indian descent should boycott Tobago and spend their vacation money elsewhere. Now I want to ask, if the response to losing an election is a boycott and a pull out then fine, that is anyone's right, but what of the precedent it now sets? What happens if (God forbid) the UNC loses the next General Election? Will they pull out of Trinidad? Will every East Indian move to the UNC held seats? And then what, secede? What will they become - The United States of Caroni & Chaguanas? See this is what happens when idiocy replaces critical thinking, and this is precisely what has been running this country for some time now, complete idiocy.

Take also the Head of the Maha Sabha Sat Maharaj, who was the first out of the box with this lunacy. Are there consequences for public utterances that could, at the extreme, lead to public unrest due to racial strife? Chairman of the United National Congress (and Minister of National Security no less) Jack Warner has again put his foot in it by coming down on the wrong side of this nonsense and, armed without even the remotest shred of evidence to back up these dubious claims, has indicted the entire population of Tobago as racists and, having painted them all with the same broad brush, sentenced them to their fate. His position that the people have chosen to remain with their 'political abusers' on the issue has prompted others to ask as opposed to what? Move in with a deceitful hornerman with a drinking problem who may be prone to violence?

My question is, why is this FIFA-styled gangsterism still at work in our politics? I am confounded as to the intentions here, is the idea to scare the rest of us into supporting the UNC or risk being painted as racists too? Not to be left behind by the post-election drivel train and armed with as much hubris as she could carry, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar weighed in on the issue and, dismissing the race talk, diagnosed the entire island as having voted out of fear instead, but fear of what she never goes into in any detail.

I put to you that the real reason for all this race talk nonsense serves one purpose only and that is to distract the population from the reality of what really occurred, to deflect  away from the truth that the Partnership experiment has failed and the glaring lack of substance on the government's part has not only been exposed and found wanting, it has come home to haunt them in spades.  American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow (of Mazlow's hierarchy of needs fame) is noted to have said - 'When the only tool you have is a hammer you tend to treat every problem as a nail.' For this government that hammer has been their campaign machinery, and the question that must be dominating all of their post election arguing has to be - what do you do when the only thing you know how to do is no longer good enough?

It is understandable if there never was an exit plan as no one in the PP could have contemplated such a devastating defeat, but in their rush to shift blame they are making matters worse for themselves and everyone else. Perhaps they see themselves as having nothing left to lose, who knows, but attempting to put the blame on anyone else may be far easier to accept than the only remaining alternative, that the party itself may have become unelectable. IF that is allowed to be even considered as a fact then there may be no saving it.