Desperately Seeking Leadership....

Trying to fix Trinidad & Tobago is a lot like trying to talk a drug addict out of using drugs. He may understand the argument against his habit on a rational, even intellectual level and may actually agree with you, but on an instinctive level he knows that without his fix he's nothing, so unless your words and your actions eventually facilitate the continuation of his addiction they become moot.

We have become a people educated in the belief that the state is the source of all largesse so we are taught to seek state support as the ultimate solution. From state board positions, government land, contracts, projects, CEPEP gangs right down to the man or woman doing the actual 'ten days,' our version of trickle down economics has been amped up to high, turned us all inward and rendered any remaining spark of creativity or entrepreneurial genius retooled to be  just another means to secure state dollars.

Someone said to me recently -  if something's not broken, why try to fix it? That besides the horrible news of violent crime and mayhem the majority of people were actually happy drunk and bent over, so didn't I think that perhaps the best solution might be to ban the news altogether? In a rational world that last line would have caused the reader to chuckle, but here in T&T most of the people reading that would have paused to consider its plausibility, here in a country where many polled actually supported a government minister (charged with national security no less) floating the idea of keeping police homicide and murder statistics a 'secret' as it helps no one and disturbs everyone. No, trying to fix anything here may well prove impossible before the petro-chemical dollars run out completely and, until we gather around the dry oil tap with cupped hands and surprised expressions, await the dawning of the realization of our new condition.

Take the recently concluded Tobago House of Assembly elections for example, an election that exposed the embarrassing secret that more than half of the people living on the island work directly for the government, thereby creating a scenario where the majority of the monies allocated to the island at budget time goes not toward development of infrastructure or social capital but to fund a 'nanny-state' experiment gone mad. How no one on the campaign trail even saw it fit to raise the spectre of a world where this could no longer be afforded and its ominous consequences for the survival of the island is itself to me a clear indication of the looming crisis this lack of leadership portends, but what do we do? How do you get people to vote 'away' from what they are bred and schooled to strive for?

We have devolved into an extremely irresponsible people, from the violent gang member willing to do anything to anybody to the unscrupulous businessman who sells the lowest quality that he can get away with at the highest price he can gouge and the public official or government minister that looks the other way for his 'cut' in the profits. From the 'respectable' drug money launderer who puts profits and position above social responsibility to the man who thinks nothing of taking another's life for money, rationalized on all sides that every one has to live so anything goes. How do you fix that? How do you fix the businessman born rich who parlays his fortune into more fortune just for more's sake, without pausing to appreciate the effect of his action on the quality of life of the collective? Or the aspiring politician who espouses all manner of platitudes to achieve power only to enrich himself and further the very conditions he campaigned against?

Abraham Lincoln is noted to have quipped - “Is leadership telling people what they want to hear or taking them where they need to go?” And as much as I understand the sentiment and agree with it wholeheartedly, Trinidad (and Tobago) provides the exception that disproves the idea. Here the people fight against their collective best interest and ignore what could be procrastinated in exchange for what's on the plate right now regardless of class, station or level of education. We don't want change, we want 'more.' More money, more roads, more cars, more carnivals, more alcohol, more nudity, more sex, more food, more stuff and less of the responsibility that comes with it all. The arguments behind any social interventions in the failed communities that are ground zero for the seemingly unending wave of violent crime always comes down to supporting parents in the raising of their children, but what if the parents do not want that? What if they want someone to take over the responsibility completely, freeing them up to act up and 'bruk' out? A former government minister when discussing the recently born artificially fertilized sextuplets unbelievably remarked that the responsibility for children is ultimately the state's, leading many to view her in a new and favorable light and causing me to reconsider spending any more of my remaining life in a place that could be so infuriatingly impossible at times. How she comes to make such a stupid statement and not get called out on it is a clear indication of our lack of awareness and may be better evidence of who we really are than any other argument or position put forward so far.

Proverbs 29:18  says - Where there is no vision, the people perish, and as much as we would like to close our eyes and accelerate our irresponsibility, at some point in the future we or our children have a date with the consequences of our current actions and it may not be an easy row to hoe. To say we owe it to our future selves and our children to do what we can today to change this place by changing our unreasonable, unruly, indisciplined selves is an understatement, but until we realize that we are the raindrops that are causing the floods of our coming demise we have only nowhere worth going to go and not much time left to get there.