An unholy trinity

On Easter Sunday, we remember Angelia Butler, the ten-month-old baby burnt to a crisp in her house at Sugar Hill, Rampanalgas, last week, as waves and waves of cold, murky water pounded the North-Eastern coast.

We remember two-year-old Luke Marshall, who died of bacterial meningitis. Luke had nurses at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex laugh at his parents when they brought him in. A doctor misdiagnosed him as having a case of heavy earwax. To add a kind of insult to what was already a tragedy, it emerged that the doctor also reportedly prescribed too much medicine for earwax in any event, given Luke’s weight.

Yes, those nurses might laugh with joy this Easter Sunday when they see baby Luke come back.

And maybe baby Nadeisha Glasgow will return to them too.

Baby Nadeisha was just ten months old when, vomiting and with a high fever, doctors said she was suffering from dehydration. Then, according to her mother, Pamela, they said she had gastro. It was only on her deathbed that she was diagnosed with meningitis. She was buried on September 2, 2000, the day she was supposed to be christened.

This Easter Sunday, we as a nation have a lot to think about.

From the sad state of our under-resourced and increasingly callous health-care system to its bastard cousins — the chronic judicial and political systems. Make no mistake the three are very much connected.

For, it is the contempt of our bourgeois politics that has, through successive administrations, crippled our Parliament and turned it into a mere play-thing for politicians. Now, we see moves to make Parliament even more irrelevant, with JSCs being cut from three to two. Questions, once a fairly straight-forward way of getting government to account, have now become a minefield of filibustering.

And for every politician who does not answer a question in the Red House, there is a witness in a murder trial or preliminary inquiry who does not answer questions just as well. Crime, left to grow rampant and to create its own sub-culture of violence and intimidation by the self-same politicians, now enacts its final vengeance in silencing those who dare to walk into a public court of law.

Because of the complacency of those who sit in the Red House, we now have gangs of little boys with tattooed tears, walking in and out of the prisoners’ docks, and witnesses not answering questions put to them by prosecutors.

The same politicians, for whom there is never a straightforward answer, are the ones that approve the appropriation of millions for projects of questionable merit, when hospitals lack beds, sheets, equipment, nurses and doctors. They would like to see citizens work towards being able to pay for private health-care instead of being given handouts.

But we don’t want handouts. We just ask to stay alive. Just that.

Yes, maybe there will be something glorious in our nation this Sunday. Some resurrection of sorts as water lashes hard rock. We have a lot to think about.