OUR NEW YEAR WISHES
As any other Trinidad and Tobago citizen we made our several New Year wishes as the clocks chimed midnight heralding the birth of 2005. The principal difference being that while the average person’s wishes are traditionally on his behalf our wishes for the New Year were for a safer and more caring Trinidad and Tobago. For example, we wished that the worst case natural disaster scenarios outlined by the Prime Minister at a Whitehall news conference on Tuesday, of tsunamis, one caused by a major earthquake off the country’s East coast and the other by an eruption of a sub-sea volcano off Grenada with both affecting Trinidad and Tobago, would never become realities.
We wished for a crime free Trinidad and Tobago or at least for a significant reduction in the murder rate as well as in kidnapping, cases of rape and incest, attempted murder, robbery with aggravation, pickpocketing, mugging, domestic violence, sexual harassment, corruption, intimidation of witnesses, arson, breaking and entering, vehicle theft and assault among others. In addition, we wished for the Protective Services to be better positioned to tackle the illegal drug trade and the barons themselves. Fatal vehicular accidents did not escape our sweep of New Year wishes in which we wished for them to be a thing of the past or greatly reduced, as we did in the case of dangerous and reckless driving, speeding, drag racing, driving without due care and attention, driving under the influence of alcohol, persons without valid driving permits being at the wheels of vehicles; driving defective vehicles and vehicles with smooth or threadbare tyres and illegal tints.
We wished that young people and not so young ones as well would be more helpful to the elderly, the visually impaired and physically challenged, and that drivers would do, as obtains in nearby Barbados, and stop to allow middle aged and elderly persons to cross the street, even in the absence of zebra crossings, traffic wardens or on duty Police Officers. The Police Mobile Division received special mention and we wished that there would be more and visible Police mobile patrols on the nation’s highways, main and secondary roads to curb speeding, dangerous driving and overtaking and other serious offences, instead of officers appearing suddenly and in relatively large numbers after, but hardly ever before the fact.
We wished, too, that Licensing Officers could, like the Traffic Police, be a little more vigilant, and for the introduction by Government of a National Traffic Plan. We wished that residents of some neighbourhoods would be somewhat more considerate and turn down the volume of their DVD players and discmans rather than playing them in such a manner as to disturb others with tunes, many of them full of obscenities. The same wish went out for operators of conventional and maxi taxis, whose radios blare out the latest imported filth put to music to the annoyance of concerned passengers including schoolchildren.
Politicians were not forgotten, and we wished that some would be less into double speak and/or the criticising, without analysing them, of each other’s offered plans and programmes merely for the scoring of cheap points, and to gain an additional paragraph or two in a news story. We wished that Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean politicians would seek to implement, fully and unreservedly, the Caribbean Single Market and Economy as well as the Caribbean Court of Justice.
A 2005 introduction of the CSME, we felt, would provide the country and the region with the time, already short as it is, to introduce the free movement of capital, goods and people before the full onslaught of globalisation. We wished that more citizens would be sexually responsible in 2005 and opt for single partner relationships and, in the process, minimise the risk of the spread of HIV/AIDS, already a gathering storm in Trinidad and Tobago and many Caribbean countries. We wished as well for a better health service. In turn, along with the above, we wished our readers, advertisers and vendors and indeed all citizens and/or residents of Trinidad and Tobago and the region a Happy and Prosperous New Year.
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"OUR NEW YEAR WISHES"