Licks for politicians who fail to deliver

THE EDITOR: My shock and horror at the idea of re-introducing beating in schools only began to subside when I realised its true potential. Here’s my suggestion. Of course, we don’t want mainly (or only) low-income children to receive these blows. Nor should schools be the only places where knowledge of fear and domination are nurtured. We want to make sure that a wide cross section of the population understands the power of violence in creating a responsible and community-oriented civil society. If you do something wrong, you can expect to be disciplined by almost any means necessary. This surely fits with the 2020 plan for peace and development in a society which okays hanging people whose appeals are still pending and sending the army into Laventille to assert (as state and not criminal elements) that might is still right.

Building on our long history of violence (in homes, schools, the streets, the hustings etc), I suggest that we extend beatings to the House of Parliament and to politicians  who fail to deliver promises or to stop corruption and crime. When someone thinks that getting less than 40 percent of the vote is a good grade, they have clearly not been paying attention. A well-aimed guava stick might fix that. A good strap might stop others from lying about WASA salaries — just admit you didn’t do your homework. And, surely TTUTA will agree that the mismanagement of airport extension funds was a woeful tale of poor fourth standard arithmetic. Let beatings reach the highest levels so that all of us can equally feel the whip, so that not only schools will feel like jail and so that successive governments will know we have followed this quite dotish and brutish suggestion to its logical conclusion.

GABRIELLE HOSEIN
Port-of-Spain