Peter pays for Paul, says NALIS

THE EDITOR: One of the most unsettling aspects of living within the boundaries of contemporary society is that of being faced with the wide brush of discrimination. From Hitler’s Jewish Holocaust to the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and to the ethnically charged politics of Afro and Indo Trinidad, people of different mores and ethics are easily and often cast among groups for which they sometimes have little of no affinity.

Take the recent decision by NALIS to unilaterally ban all students of some secondary schools from attending the spanking new National Library in Port-of-Spain. First, how can NALIS be certain that the students that are causing the problems do in fact attend these schools? In this day it is nothing for boys and girls to borrow/buy the uniform of any secondary school and impersonate their students. If NALIS can indeed prove that the perpetrators, whose actions so moved them to this drastic step of ‘tarring’ the entire student body of the named schools, were indeed bona fide students then why not simply ban these individuals.

It is unimaginable that NALIS has a membership system in place and could not simply enforce a ban that would apply to any individual caught breaking the rules of the library. What is the message that is being sent to the youths of today when such a high profile organisation whose very existence is to promote learning with sharing of knowledge seeks to brand negatively in such a wholesale manner? When the Police harass the rasta head because he is rasta, is it any different? When the Indians in Central/South Trinidad believe that only afro-Trinidadian men would want to rape their girlfriends, wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, is this not the same? When all who run for public office are deemed to be smart men and crooks, where does it stop? What is even more disturbing is that NALIS did not call in the officials from the schools — who were guilty with no hope of being proved innocent — and discuss the nature of the infractions and arrive at possible positive actions rather than what can only be deemed a heavy handed approach to a basic problem. Three years ago officials at NALIS were asked to consider the ramifications of having a costly monument that could only realistically serve PoS and its environs? Why not put the money into developing regional library resources and the provision of information via information technology? The rationale of their response that every capital city deserves a national library may be debatable; however, this vision presupposes open access to the knowledge and history contained in the Library for all citizens of Trinidad and Tobago — especially our youth.

To so summarily restrict a student population (a junior secondary may have as many as 1,800+ student s of some 7,000 students flies in the face of common decency and indicates an unwillingness to mete out punishment to the guilty when it is so easy to condemn the innocent. Unfortunately, this is a constant aspect of life in Trinidad and Tobago where we so easily generalise our opinions and then cannot justify them to anyone other than ourselves.  Come on NALIS, locate the perpetrators, ban them from the Library and let the innocent who you say have need of your services back into their National Library.

LOUIS R HERNANDEZ
Diego Martin