A prophet of doom

PROPHETS of doom have their usefulness. In biblical times, we are told, they were used by God to issue all kinds of condemnations and warnings, not only to the wayward Israelites but also to their enemies, other societies in which idol worship and various forms of ungodliness were rampant. Listening to Suren Capildeo as he addressed the graduation ceremony of the Simbhoonath Capildeo Hindu School on Wednesday, it was difficult not to be disturbed by his message of doom, whether or not it was divinely inspired. In forthright terms, Mr Capildeo said things about our country which, perhaps, needed to be said, sounding an alarm which, while forlorn, may force us into accepting  a bitter truth or something close to it.

He declared, “Who is God’s name is going to beg forgiveness for the wanton criminal destruction of so many thousands and thousands of lives of the young men and women of Trinidad and Tobago? This is a crime which makes all criminal activity today pale into insignificance because not only can we not replace lost generations, but we are doomed to suffer the consequences of the present generations.” A former UNC parliamentarian, one may be inclined to suspect that the Port-of-Spain attorney still has a political axe to grind. But Mr Capildeo had quit public life many years ago, a disenchanted man, and has shown no indication of a desire to return. Still, he speaks with the same fervent conviction which made his late father, Simbhoonath, one of the most respected debaters in the country’s parliament.

Mr Capildeo tells it as he sees it, and if he comes over as a prophet of doom he may be forcing us to react not only in alarm but also in examining the truth of his statements and in resolving as a society to seek a reversal of the disastrous trend, no matter how impossible it may seem. “How do you deal with a nation of juvenile criminal cuss bud dunces?” he asked, pointing out that there were more criminals on the outside than inside the nation’s prisons. “Not only are we breeding a nation of illiterates, we want to set the world record in obscenity. Of the 32,174 students in urban junior secondary schools, 23,487 cuss and swear at will.” He continued: “You do not have to be a genius to work out the correlation between our education system and what has been taking place and what is happening to us today. This country has been betrayed in an unashamedly, scandalous and obscene manner by the Ministry of Education.

This criminality has been going on unbroken, undisturbed and seemingly protected for 48 uninterrupted years.” Mr Capildeo has chosen to lay the blame for this disaster exclusively on the country’s education system and those responsible for its operation but, in our view, that can only be partially true since there are others who must share the responsibility for the wanton destruction of the lives of thousands of TT’s young people. They are the victims not only of the education system but also of dysfunctional homes, delinquent parents, the impact of an alien culture of violence and get-rich-quick mentality, plus the inexorable moral decay of the society as a whole. Mr Capildeo’s candid diagnosis, however, dooms our society to a troubled future and if the shock of it awakens us to the reality we must face, then he would have done us a service.