Wicked men threatening our beautiful country

THE EDITOR: “Me, I love this place,” I affirmed to my fresh water Yankee friend. He loves Carnival, Toco, pelau and Scotch “especially when you drinking with yuh partners in Arima.” He was going back to “the cold” in the ghettos of Brooklyn in a few hours. He confided to me in a stage whisper, “I ‘fraid Trinidad now!” But Trinidad is my land, I am not running to seek undeclared refugee status no where. It would take a whole train load of data to convince me that the New York slums are safer than Trinidad and Tobago. I’m not afraid of “congo ca” and “shoo shoo.” I love picong. All Trinis know all who “thief” and to even the minutest fraction of a billion the number involved.

Every Trini knows who “horning” and who getting “horn.” Well the only exception is the individual who speaks on “horn” with authority. Every one of us, Trinis to the bone has the inside story. Freedom of speech is definitely a Trini gift to the world. It is enshrined in our calypso tradition. It is made sacred in our spirited rumshop dissertations. Ours is the land where, “when mouth open story jumps out!” You understand that “story” also means lies, untruths and prevarications. It is all up to you to interpret the revelations that are so often thrown at us in Trinidad and Tobago. They might have legal suggestions or even an eschatological dimension when viewed by prophets of doom and gloom.

The platforms of the desperate are crowded by a clique of raucous rabble rousers, who with furrowed brow and frothing lips would drag us down the precipice of social disintegration on their way to political hell. No rumour is too vile. No innuendo is too satanic. No means are too ruthless to achieve their skin saving ends. Now we seem bent on going back to mother this and mother that, forgetting mother TT. The negatives are emphasised. The all too obvious bonds of our common humanity are maliciously ignored. And the field for another type of Haiti, this one rich in material assets but made poor in human values, is being prepared. It is easy to prophesy the catastrophe when you, the prophet, busily works to ensure its fulfillment.
These amoral desperadoes, seeing their deceit and dishonesty publicly exposed are calling for social upheaval in the violent tradition of all despots.

Wicked men have the gift of the forked tongue like their mentor in Eden. They spit their venom in stirring speeches to capture audiences and follow the direction that, “The ideas of Truth and Liberty are fictions, but natural fictions begotten by Life, which begins to lie as soon as it starts.” Nietzche of Macchiavett? It does not really matter to these other “realist” as they might see themselves. Morality may be talked, but among this legion of the politically damned, morality is a convention and not part of the nature of things. “Me I still love this place.”

GEORGE DAMIEN
Arima