Finding our way to enlightened thinking

THE EDITOR: Often when I write I try to mirror what we are as a people in the hope we can take stock and try to do better. Which is why in a recent letter I gave such graphic details about the slaughter of the innocents in Maracas not so long ago.

It was to illustrate how bloody and used to blood we have become as a people – the incident seemingly forgotten already – so much so that even the PM’s plaintive cry over his murdered boyhood friend, “What have we become,” continues to resonate, confronting us with the reality of what we are.

And in another way this distorted sense of value is seen in the bizarre humour displayed by some on seeing someone driving in reverse all around Port of Spain when such recklessness and lawlessness could maim and kill, and for such to endure for so long with no seeming consequence arising.

Yet what has been making headline news are the heroics of capturing escaped prisoners when it would have been so welcome if such resources and efforts could have been directed to the capturing of the many criminals who continue to shed our blood with impunity.

It’s what we value, as with a clip being repeated on the electronic media of a trio in a violent encounter over an accident, reminiscent of a pack of wolves consuming their own, one with a long knife graphically about to lunge on the other lying helpless on the ground as the third, a young woman, is flung violently across the road, as if she were a discarded KFC bone.

This is good news, the news people would say, so much so that the poor woman was invited to a TV programme where she could relive her story, sobbing at her trauma as she hid her face, for all and sundry to salivate upon.

And there is the case of how the CXC maths paper was compromised at a school in Port of Spain. Where is our sense of rightness and wrongness, our sense of duty to young people placed under our care?

And elsewhere, where is that moral sense at the leadership level that we should protect the people’s purse, not loot it, as with recent allegations, and again at the leadership level not to jeopardise the nation’s interest by biting the hands of those in the energy sector who continue to feed us, with unfair criticism.

But now to something more human. How can we be so ready to destroy the lives of people by seizing their property and hauling them before the courts for breaking an archaic law of which they knew very little, just to ensure their livelihood?

How a little dialogue from the authorities would have impressed upon them the importance of observing the law in the future and at the same time, through negotiation, setting them on a path for survival through legal water usage, as being currently done in Jamaica? But how else can the authorities teach a lesson about water conservation?

Enlightened thinking is not the province only of the First World. We as a people can be ushered in that direction, if only our institutions are managed by people who are inclined to such thinking.

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN via e-mail