A True Portrait of Trinidad... (Tobago too)

Over the years and along the way, a large cross section of our society were told that, not only do they not need to work or work hard, that school was for suckers and that someone 'else' will always be there to take care of them for the rest of their lives.

And for a while this appeared to be true, so the 'ten days' culture spread like wildfire through the communities, liberating the adults from such menial pursuits as careers, and encouraging the young ones to forgo their education opportunities in lieu of other more immediately satisfying pursuits, leaving them functionally and otherwise illiterate and wholly dependent on 'state' as 'massa.'

And in so doing, 'we' (this nation) have created a largely unemployable class of people defined (unfortunately) by race and beholding to the political party that created this problem as benefactor, now stuck between the failure of that party to live up to its promises and the reluctance of the wider nation to continue to carry them as a burden, and with dwindling 'make work' resources available to the most dependent and 'at risk' of the communities violence naturally flared up as the residents have taken to killing each other over the limited spoils, adding fuel to a strong man culture and creating gangs where families once held sway in the now largely failed or failing communities, asking of us all the following questions:

How do you deal with an 'army' of predominantly ignorant, barely socialized (in the wider context), hungry people who themselves have no option but to try to take whatever they can wherever they can find it by whatever means necessary?

How do you fix such a massive problem in the short space of time electoral politics allows for the delivery of campaign promises, so as to positively affect the crime numbers driven by this very situation with a dignity and a respect that the communities in question may not even understand or be able to process, while allowing for the entire nation to bask in the benefits of their own success?

How do you move people to choosing what is in their future best interest over the immediate satisfaction of now, even as other political impersonators, eager to take advantage of their sorry condition and their hunger continue to offer them the moon and the stars in exchange for little or no effort forever?

This is the reality of the People's National Movement's legacy in Morvant, Laventille, Beetham, Sea Lots, Rich Plain and Bagatelle, and the unjust conundrum that must face current decision makers has to be, how do you wean these people off a culture of dependance to one of contributing members of society in the limited timeframe with the same unrepentant PNM appealing to their broken minds that all they have to do to get the gravy train flowing again is to put them back into power?

And if that was not enough of a problem and to make bad matters worse, we are now faced with the idiocy of Jack Warner's populous 'box drain' nonsense politics, adding fuel to an already raging fire, distracting from the real work to be done and undermining genuine nation building policies.

So what can we do?

Outside of a massive national-resource-depleting, community-rebuilding, social development exercise what can we as a larger society do?

Do we abandon these our dispossessed brothers and sisters to the continued ignobility of the 'sufferation' that is life in the now marginalized PNM constituencies?

Or worse, to roll the dice under Jack and hope for the best?

Or do we exercise the leadership required and do the work of creating whole new functional communities complete with family support systems to give them the social equivalent of a 're-start?'

These are a people that have been victimized by those who had the power to make them strong who chose instead to make them weak, and their salvation, when it comes, must focus on righting that wrong. It will help them stand, then walk, so they can run on their own.

Hopefully, effectively done it would also unmask and expose the meaning behind the old Trini saying that 'not every skin teeth is a smile' and that not because something looks like you automatically means it cares for you.

This is the beginning of the discussion.