AMERY BROWNE
If irony had a home who knows where on Earth that would be. One can’t help but think though that irony has been a long-stay visitor to our shores for at least several generations, and that we’ve kept her busy as we have danced from slavery to cedula, from the concordat to the common entrance, and from being the Caribbean’s economic kings to “ketching” our hindquarters.
Sober reflection would prompt the question of whether we are actually the ones dancing as opposed to being danced, and it doesn’t take the deepest thinker to recognise that that Trinidad and Tobago’s most predictable performance is neither “wining” nor “chipping” but rather the national daily dance macabre between the obvious and the oblivious.
With all due respect to the excellent officers that do exist within its ranks, we cannot mention the word oblivious without making reference to the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service. This is a service that occupies media time to celebrate the smallest of “drug hauls” even whilst officers moonlight on a daily basis guarding the private interests, parties, events and transactions of some businessmen of questionable character in communities across the land.
It has been two Dole Chadee and his gang on trial and we seem to have reverted to a focus on the small fry ever since. It’s either that Chadee was the very last of the big fish or that our nets are specifically designed for guabeen. The backdrop to all of this of course is the long-disproven mentality that more machinery and weaponry will win a war on drugs and organised crime that was specifically designed to be fought and lost.
Ironic, isn’t it?
The average policeman will tell you that our officers in uniform acting on their own are powerless to stop the violence in society, and such words cannot be easily dismissed. We have on our hands a generation of young people who have been exposed to much of the wrong example during their formative years, and the culture of disrespect and greed has permeated every level of society from the pew to the Parliament. Ears filled with songs from Jamaica and elsewhere telling them that “informers” are to be shunned and destroyed.
Eyes dazzled by glittering SUVs that are sometimes piloted by well-known menaces to society adorned with expensive gold jewelry; some less recognised menaces drive similar vehicles but prefer to adorn themselves with expensive suits. Minds filled with the dull ache of chronic low self esteem maquerading as vanity, and powerlessness masquerading as bravado.
Hearts that developed in generally love-less environments, beating and beating, filled to capacity with...emptiness. The discovery of each young bullet-riddled corpse triggers the usual chatter about a lost generation, but all the while we miss the underlying narrative that it is WE who have lost them. Ironic, isn’t it?
The reaction of many of us on social media to the steady rhythm of national tragedy is in itself tragic. The established pattern is as follows: we share views on the actual story for a day or so, and then we select the most extreme, distressing, inappropriate and race-infused minority comment made by some obscure and sometimes foreign-based coward, and we immediately pivot into a new mode in which that comment itself becomes the dominant story, and we get busy ferociously re-posting and circulating the abhorrent view with additional angry reactions to it.
This phenomenon was exemplified after last week’s reprehensible murder of two schoolboys in uniform as efforts to use social media to help distill the facts, to understand the plight of other children in similar circumstances, and to empathise with the bereaved families were largely superseded by incessant outrage directed not against the florid gang culture or the actual perpetrators of the crimes but rather against some dim-whit shivering in Canada.
In the end the technology that could assist us in harnessing our collective mindpower in a socially constructive manner instead ends up facilitating hostility, suspicion, mistrust and division...some of the very flaws that have led us to the current cycle of death. Ironic, isn’t it?
The ugly truth is that there are parents in communities all across this land who on a daily basis are fearful that their children would be harmed either before, during or after school, but these same communities often remain way too tolerant of the miscreants that they fully well know live right there amongst them.
This weekend I reflected on a story I was told years ago by a colleague from Boston. Back in the day many south Boston communities were riddled with drug blocks and gang violence, and one neighbourhood lost young man after young man until they were hit with the violent death of one particularly promising and talented boy.
When that child was buried the procession turned into a spontaneous community march led by a few of the community’s religious leaders, and the march was then further transformed into a human chain around the most notorious of the drug blocks. The participants declared in unison that they’d had enough and that the gangsters must chose between either ceasing their violent ways from thence forth or killing all of the demonstrators.
Legend has it that that was the day that the tide of violence actually began changing for the better. Maybe that story is laced with a bit of naïveté which may not a good thing, but it is founded in hope, which is definitely a great thing.
I think about our communities, our young ones, our parents, our religious leaders, our politicians, our school principals, I think about the few and brave intercessors and violence interrupters like Hal Greaves, I think about my own children and I wonder...what will it take for the tide here to change, and for us as a society to finally demonstrate that we have had enough. Or maybe in this land we reserve our processions for entry to fetes, nightclubs, and polling stations. Ironic, isn’t it?