Fooling the People... (A Matter of trust)

What do you do when trust is gone? In relationships you learn to pretend and to 'act as if' everything is normal even though you know nothing is and will ever be again. In politics you spend and spend and spend some more, you spin and spin and spin some more, and you hope that after all the spending and all the spinning, the people would have forgotten why exactly they don't trust you and perhaps and maybe get back into what we like to call their 'good books' again.

Did Integrity Commission Chairman Ken Gordon do anything illegal, immoral or unethical while meeting with the Opposition Leader in their private meeting? We can never know and will have to trust that he didn't. There are many who think otherwise, and when the Law Association of the country tells you that you did something 'highly improper,' do you think they are saying that from a position of automatic trust? The Minister of Sport and Loud Noises, when he went to great pains to single out and identify the Chief Fire Officer as the person responsible for binding the country to the outrageous six point eight million dollars to 'wreck' a two million dollar firetruck, now that the Chief Fire Officer has come out and said publicly that he had nothing to do with that, who does the Minister of Still Unanswered Auditor General Questions think the people believe?

This is the problem at the heart of our problems, the fact that there is so little of substance on which to rely or to build trust on in the first place.

When Prakash Ramadhar called a Congress of the People meeting in Diego Martin and had more than ninety per cent of the audience 'bused in' from elsewhere, what was he doing? Was it the same thing that Jack Warner was doing (albeit multiplied by a thousand) in Chaguanas on Friday evening? Of the twenty thousand people claimed to have been there, how many of them can actually vote in the upcoming Chaguanas bye election? About as many as can vote in Prakash's Diego Martin illusion I am sure, so what's the point of the exercise?

What was Keith Rowley doing when he stood up in front of the predominantly labor crowd on the very Friday at the united workers march where he told them that the People's National Movement had a history of representing workers politically from ever since, despite the fact that he was sharing a stage with the leader of the Movement for Social Justice, the same workers' own political organization formed ostensibly in reaction to the same PNM and their counterpart, the United National Congress? Was he rewriting history and making David Abdullah's presence a farce? And what of Abdullah? How does he justify sharing a stage with the same Party he denigrated and scorned a mere three years ago in exchange for another which he denigrates and scorns today? What is the point of his 'pendulum-esque' politicking? Is the MSJ destined to forever be nothing more than a political appendage?

And what about the Prime Minister? What of her newly discovered almost magical ability to rattle off the litany of sins alleged to have been committed by the same Jack Warner when he was her greatest defender, what was she doing? Was she like all of the others mentioned above, engaging in fooling the people?

But why would they need to? Can Prakash Ramadhar really fool himself into believing that his bought and paid for crowds adore and support him? Does Jack Warner really believe that he can out-spend and out-spin the image of hungry, starving orphans and widows in the earthquake ravaged nation of Haiti for whom he has demonstrated the ultimate of contempts if we are to believe the donors of the charity funds that never got to their destination? Does Keith Rowley really believe that his handful of support could really pull down the government in time for him to rush a challenge before his own constitutionally due political demise? Or that his challengers within his own party are really prepared to be saddled with him as Prime Minister regardless of how badly they too want power?

The Chairman of the Integrity Commission may have successfully defended his right to be wrong, but what has he accomplished by so doing where his name, his legacy and the Office he holds are concerned?

Can the Prime Minister continue to spin whole fiction out of flimsy fact without having to create a Ministry of Untruths, Half-Truths & Outright Lies if only to keep track of what she said on the same issue yesterday?

Abraham Lincoln is noted to have said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can never fool all of the people all of the time.”

Perhaps if he were alive today he might think differently, because we seem to be saddled with a devious and deceitful group of Office holders and Office seekers doing their damnedest to test that theory, if not prove it wrong altogether.