Days of our Lives

Both days are important to remember but there is a particular significance to linking our national heroines and heroes with that moment in history when we decided to embrace nationhood fully. How that has worked out for us thus far calls for a deeper analysis for another day, but the sentiment that the President seeks to engender in us is in fact our independence; our ability as a nation to define our path in our own best interest quite separate from the dictates from the political ties of a former time. I have no doubt my mother, a West Indies Federalist to the end, would approve.

The problem is we have allowed so much to clutter our vision for ourselves; we are running forward to 2020- or now 2030- carried along by the cheering rhetoric of politicians without pause to take stock of where we are going or, for that matter, what we are running from.

As significant days go, July 27 has claimed a place in the history books of Trinidad and Tobago for the events of that and the ensuing six days. The 1990 attempted coup was clearly a stock taking moment. The Commission of Enquiry some twenty years later by no means satisfied the imperative of stock taking.

The question for contemplation really is whether the state of the nation at the time was so beyond democratic remedy to lead the perpetrators to believe their actions were justified, or was the coup just a dramatic, and ultimately foolhardy, way of dealing with their particular vexation with the government of the day? That can be debated ad nausea but as Wesley Gibbings quite insightfully points out in a recent article, the facts as recalled by some have become the dominant narrative and so embedded that it is hard to imagine there is space for other perspectives. All of human history is like that though, based on the record of those who had a voice at the time of the retelling.

Despite the irony, one can hardly disagree with Abu Bakr’s public sentiments about the state of criminality in the country, which is indeed far worse now than it was when he led the assault on the democracy back in 1990. But does that mean we are likely to experience another attempt at a violent take over? Not necessarily.

I would imagine that there are intelligence personnel from this and other countries closely monitoring the situation in Trinidad particularly given the upheavals taking place in Venezuela. Many factors have to be in place before the kind of “civil disturbance” feared by some could come to pass, not least of those a unifying political agenda to bring together all the disparate criminal groups.

Are there groups out there that, along with busying themselves with the violent claiming of turf for quick economic gain, have aspirations of taking over the reigns of governance? If so, are the groups unified enough to be of singular purpose? It is hard to imagine at this point, however, that being said, there are worrying signs that the “haves” and “have nots” are being defined along ethnic lines which raises the specter of racially motivated criminality. Whether this is the case or not, the fear that one could be at risk just for belonging to one ethnic group or other has already begun to take hold. When did it come to this?