Democracy Trini style

LLOYD RAGOO

SOON WE will be celebrating 56 years of independence and 42 as a republic, and while we’ve had our challenges and love to say we’ve moved on, surely it must have dawned on us that democracy and all that it stands for is not an instantaneous achievement, but an objective that requires eternal vigilance, continuous adjustments, and, most crucial, cooperation, among all sectors, especially our vain political factions, to bring about not just prosperity but also stability, law and order.

Because without cooperation, the simple liberties we take for granted can easily descend into unhealthy, immoral and illegal practices that become accepted norms in our society. For instance, in our democracy it seems acceptable to smoke on crowded streets and public places and discourteously blow the cancer-laden secondhand smoke among children, pregnant women and non-smokers.

In our democracy, after squandering our already limited income on revelry, we can gripe about government’s failure to provide support for our domestic needs. In our democracy, a man can father half a dozen children with different women with little or no thought of maintenance. And men can make the most repulsive sexual remarks towards women who are total strangers to them, and they (the women) are expected to at least smile. And men can unzip and pee anywhere in everybody’s view.

In our democracy, drinking establishments and brothels far outnumber mosques, temples and churches and we still boast that God is a Trini. In our democracy, if your district is experiencing a lack of maintenance of basic infrastructure, you can protest by burning tyres on the road or totally stop the flow of traffic with bulky debris. And since it’s implied that this primitive illegal act is initiated by elected Members of Parliament who conveniently show up after the media’s arrival, no one is usually arrested.

In our democracy, if you are charged with committing a heinous crime and all the evidence points against you, given our apparent manipulative and foreign-based directorial justice system, your chances of escaping the stipulated sentence is still highly probable. And in the meantime, your attorney can whine about the ambiance, or lack of it, at the place of your detention.

In our democracy, since there’s no matching physical penalty for various types of crimes, offenders welcome sentences with a “dress-back” mentality while the hangman, the birch and hundreds of acres of fertile state lands lie idle and huge prison food and security bills are generated.

In our democracy, while trade unions’ financial members are begging for accountability, the executives can sidetrack such calls with irrelevant appeals to boycott essential businesses simply because those businesses belong to a business-conscious minority group.

In our democracy, if the private billion-dollar conglomerate you played a key administrative role in runs into financial challenges, you can take flight to another country and from there monitor proceedings as the State now attempts to resolve (at taxpayers’ expense of course) the billion-dollar mayhem you and your executive allegedly fashioned. And even with the State’s financial involvement, rest assured that while TT has extradition arrangements with some countries, extradition and prosecution for white-collar crimes are seemingly not eagerly pursued.

In our democracy, promises of jail for corrupt state officials guaranteed both by those in power and those aspiring to get into power are now seen for what they really are – empty rhetoric. The only people that appear to gain in cases of alleged dishonesty, notably by ousted officials, are attorneys hired by current state officials.

In our democracy if you were sworn into Parliament with religious text in upraised hand, you can still carry on in an appalling Carnival-like manner during sessions. In our democracy, both major political parties have maliciously abandoned near-finished billion-dollar state projects started by those they ousted. Cooperation between them seems impossible even for the induction of crucial crime-eradication measures.

Ironically, fixated red and yellow worshippers are the real victims of these leaders’ schism. True to their (MPs) egocentric form though, salary increases for themselves presents no hurdles.

Considering the present concerns of the European Union, crude oil’s instability in the face of ongoing shale-oil development, increased missile firing by unpredictable nations, the ever-spreading global terrorist threat, the influx of undocumented citizens from our oil-rich but unstable southwestern neighbour, and the suspected volatile leadership of a superpower that in reality is one of our major suppliers of goods and services and our military protector, exactly what will it take to jolt us into reality?

Given our divided parliament history, if our country is faced with a critical state of affairs that requires urgent cooperation by those 41 MPs to resolve, would there still exist a Catch 22 situation?

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"Democracy Trini style"

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