Negative reviews of TT on the Internet

THE EDITOR: It was T H White who said that, “The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.” Clearly this statement cannot be attributed to the experts and experienced practitioners who are engaged in either social developmental programmes or provide advice as part of their vocational raison detre in Trinidad and Tobago. I refer here to the plethora of well meaning and sound advice to government and the business community who are now the targets of the criminal elements that are growing in brazenness in the perpetration of crime against the person and property. The response of the government and those directly affected (the victims), to my mind are at best “a frinziful self-preservation desperation”.

The current situation reminds me of the great words of Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) when he wrote “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” These towering words come into significance when one considers the numerous failed crime plans that have not elicited an evaluative pronouncement by the authorities, but for further plans with quaint acronyms such as anaconda, Baghdad and the like. I suspect that in the present round of kidnapping intensification more fanciful appellations will emerge from inclined minds only to be supplanted by others because the solutions proffered “lack the finished beauty’ though we are never told that they were ‘wrong’. The efforts of experts from both ends of the academic and professional-practitioner spectrum cannot now be ignored if lasting solutions are to be found to this nagging problem which, according to the authorities, have not affected foreign investment, local business interests and our international standing. What ‘pie in the sky and wishful thinking’!. One simply has to go on the Internet and read the gargantuan negative reviews this country is getting. Is the government saying that these are ‘much a do about nothing!?’ For heaven’s sake get real!

I have considered and evaluated the matrix of solutions offered and I am very impressed with those advanced by Professor Ramesh Deosaran, Father Jerry Pantin and the commentary of President Maxwell Richards. Perhaps the most potent to date can be extrapolated from one whom I consider a Laventille icon and sleeping giant for social transformation at the grass roots and social justice level, Mr Lennox Smith. I have heard him many times on radio, television, and read his comments in all of the local newspapers. In fact, I was so impressed with his articulation of both the problem and the solutions that I was driven to call in on a radio programme to suggest an advisory position for him by government. Indeed, Mr Smith’s experience and practical workable antidote to the crime situation are nestled in deep concentration and study of the subject over years. If the society will only listen attentively, the echo of Mr Smith’s counter crime measures will proffer the panacea since it recognises and respects the source of the issue and advocates the intrinsic and pivotal role of the individual, family, the neighbourhood and institutions of socialisation/control in a cost-effective. dynamic and holistic concatenation necessary for resolution of the present crime crisis. For it was Benjamin Franklin who said “You may delay, but time will not” while Proverbs 23:18 notes “For, is there a posterity? Then thy hope is not cut off”. The government has a responsibility to swallow its pride and pursue those of wisdom and experience in the present battle to make the final solution “beautiful”.

NOEL SAMUEL
Tunapuna