The good and the bad

Quite apart from her hugely popular Carnival remix of Leave Me Alone, with Machel, Calypso Rose’s newest album, “Far From Home”, has gone platinum after taking sweet calypso to the French, and hence to all the world music fraternity.

France has been the womb of world music, with nearly all the great names — from Salif Keita to Cesaria Evora — making it there first. Next, Calypso Rose will be performing in the leading concert halls of London and Berlin.

In newspaper interviews she has revealed the critical role of her manager in her success, getting her the right music collaborators such as the infinitely exciting, musically imaginative Manu Chao for the album, planting her musical seed in fertile ground, timing the release of her album. I just want to say that one hand don’t clap.

This brings me to the bad: It is not good our Prime Minister being at the centre of a national debate because of careless utterances on domestic violence, abuse and the murder of so many TT women. While the honourable PM is quite right that women must exercise good judgment and care when choosing partners, that is not the end of the story. Before girls know what is happening to their bodies, the men and the boys are usually upon them like sharks. Most girls learn how to manage that to survive safely into maturity. That they do with parental and other adult guidance.

Unfortunately, many girls and women cannot count on such support and through vulnerability and inexperience find themselves in potentially dangerous relationships.

Every adult knows that intimate relationships are never plain sailing and demand personal strength and emotional intelligence. The role of the State is to protect the vulnerable by providing adequate systems. But, like in so much we do, we just fail miserably. The PM missed a chance to address our men, who too are victims.

For many very clear reasons they are emotionally unable to cope with life and its strains, with their lack of power. What are we going to do about that? It is not only down to women. The Police Service has a role in better supporting people like Christine Joseph whose deranged boyfriend murdered her last week.

She did what the PM advocates — she did get out of the relationship and there was a restraining order in place. However, that does not obviously offer foolproof safety and has to be improved.

For four years a National Geographic TV crew embedded itself with the US Border Patrol that works to reduce the importing of thousands of tons of drugs from Latin America across US borders and the exporting of an estimated US$25 billion of cash and guns south every year. I advocate that all police officers be made to watch that television series to see what real policing is about.

I don’t want to disparage a profession but our police officers cannot catch cockroaches in comparison with their US counterparts. It may be that our police are less clever but I would argue that they are not well trained or equipped. For example, US police routinely use canine patrols and X-ray vehicles and containers. Do we? Those officers follow their noses, observe tiny anomalies, can easily spot suspects and operate with a lot of information.

We spend more than many on crime prevention, so the failure is doubly offensive.

Both the police are State are culpable.