Too much, too little, too late?

There is a timelessness with songs that deal with love won and love lost. It is the eternal ode to the fragile nature of relationships, of life itself. As one person said, there are only two certain things in life: taxes and death.

You could almost say the People’s Partnership Government was founded on the lyrics of Bob Marley and Celine Dion as thousands sang along with their leader as she wooed and won their hearts with her rock star performances on the political platform. It was a novel, charming approach to campaigning as it was a cute response to Shakespeare’s analysis that if music is the food of life, then play on.

But while it was all well and good for KPB to sing her way into the hearts of her beguiled supporters during the campaign, after the election something more sustainable was needed than Shakespeare’s musical dish. Real food.

Real food means not just things gastronomical, but people wanted more than platform promises; and they wanted them like yesterday. All kinds of theories have been advanced for the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, but the one that continues to gain currency as the main cause is the citizens’ awareness in the Eastern bloc that a better life existed in the West; that one had a plethora of choices when one shopped, and one needed not to buy just what the leaders felt was good for them. The option of choice is fundamental to the idea of freedom.

For more than half a century, voters had two choices: you either voted for an Afro-Trini party or an Indo-Trini party. For a long time the citizens were satisfied with this ethnic dichotomy. But as the years passed, it seeped into their heads that whichever of them went into power, they themselves did not benefit in any tangible way. A third force however has been in the reckoning for ages. Is it here now?

It was the Information Age that provided the citizens of the Soviet Union that Coke is it and that Levis was the hottest jeans when it came to cool clothes. The information age has accelerated with the breathtaking arrival of today’s social media which is credited with the uprising of the Arab spring.

Once upon a time, a movie released in Hollywood or Bollywood took a year or more to reach our theatres. Today we could view movies (via pirate copies) before they have actually been released by the producers?

Too little, too late, suggests that if you do not deliver on time, whatever you have to give thereafter is no longer going to help towards reconciliation with an aggrieved party. How many movies have we seen, how many books have we read where the broken-hearted protagonist walks away forever because his/her beloved took him/her for granted and then one day the straw broke the camel’s back and all the king’s men and king’s horses couldn’t put back together this humpty dumpty camel ever again?

Human nature is one fickle conundrum. It could be as forgiving as of the turning of the other cheek as it could be as vengeful as of accepting the taking of an eye-for-an-eye advice.

The story goes (and we all know it) how the king himself, Elvis Presley, went down on his knees and begged to no avail, forgiveness of his wife Priscilla after she had walked away from him for his neglect of her. He expressed for the world to hear how sorry he was in this song: “Maybe I didn’t treat you Quite as good as I should have; maybe I didn’t love you Quite as often as I could have; Little things I should have said and done, I just never took the time. You were always on my mind (twice). Tell me, tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died. Give me, give me one more chance, to keep you satisfied, satisfied...”

Presley died never regaining that love he once had and took for granted, but left that most poignant of songs for the world to have as a guide to living a life where you don’t have to miss the water after the well has run dry.

The PP is now on a mission to proverbially stitch (out of time?) so much more than nine. Via the social media an entire country’s discontent networked and gelled right in front the Government’s face and they missed it.

Has Elvis (Celine) left the building and is replaced by the ILP?

lsiddh@yahoo.com