An exceptional New Year wish

Castle Killarney on Queen's Park Savannah, Port of Spain.  - JEFF K MAYERS
Castle Killarney on Queen's Park Savannah, Port of Spain. - JEFF K MAYERS

As Christmas 2019 begins to wind down I must say I feel a certain pleasure. It was not the happiest of years but I am determinedly optimistic that the start of a new decade will bring some much-needed relief. That’s not to say that it will be plain sailing, that I reject a friend’s warning that things must get worse before getting better and that we seem to be still heading south, but what’s the point about being downbeat?

There is so much to get us down, indeed, but there is lots to cheer about too, at least on the face of it.

We live in a country full of music and physical beauty, where the season change is so subtle and colourful food is always abundant, where rivers flow and birds sing all manner of tune where all the ethnic groups and religions rejoice in our humanity and let those who celebrate the birth of Christ do so in peace.

As I drove around the Queen's Park Savannah on Christmas Eve I stopped to see the romantic Mille Fleurs architectural treasure unwrapped, after defying complete destruction and years in a dark shroud. That entire western side of the Savannah now sports some of the most elegant and varied manifestations of the love of and pride in the life here felt by their previous owners. Some of our national wealth has rightly gone into reviving from QRC to Killarney and around to the elegant President’s House, except the privately owned, exceptional Roomor House, which should receive a state maintenance grant.

We should ensure those edifices do not all return to a dilapidated condition, as previously. I would love to see the Lion House and our sugar factories and all the other vestiges of our architectural wealth and history on the Heritage Asset Register properly restored and cared for, as they could feed our souls and also our pockets because they have enormous touristic value.

I once read that the first thing to fix in life is one’s attitude. Maybe that’s right, but how well one manages to do that really depends on one’s circumstances. For many people attitude is a luxury. The Syrians who have lived through years of the most awful horrors of war, total loss and displacement must be driven by a basic, irresistible human instinct to survive; how else to explain their survival? As this year ends, the terrible news that Isis is re-emerging is enough to dampen the spirit of even the most dedicated optimist.

Yet it was inevitable, just like our local government election’s low turnout, like the UK Labour Party historical loss in the December general election, like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu finally getting bumped out of the prime ministership after his epic attempt to escape justice for all his boldfaced corruption, and his friend Donald Trump getting impeached on Capitol Hill.

Apart from our personal travails and the most compelling events of this annus horribilis, to quote HM Queen Elizabeth in her 1992 Christmas address, were those which palpably demonstrate just how the nature of politics has changed for the worse: party before country, president before country and party, conviction politics, strongman rule, lying, cheating, self-delusion, the blame game, genocide, defence of the indefensible, bored electorates, ignorant electorates, brain-washed and corrupt party faithful seem to be the present currency internationally. It is the new spirit of the age, but it definitely degrades us all.

While contemplating the various possible fonts of this alarming reality, which sprang up against us apparently quite suddenly (except of course that it was long in the making), I broke off to read a review in the UK Guardian of a recently published memoir, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging by Tessa McWatt, the Guyanese-born Canadian writer who is also a professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Britain (Check her out at the 2020 NGC Bocas Lit Fest, May 1-3). The reviewer sees the “eloquent” memoir as a response to the “structure of exploitation and inequality that is ‘everywhere’ now in our society, immiserating great swathes of the population, corrupting our politics, undermining human solidarities.”

Canadian Guyanese writer Tessa McWatt author of Shame on Me is due for the 2020 NGC Bocas Lit Fest in May. -

On Phys.org – the science news website – Prof Turchin, a leading expert on cliodynamics at the University of Connecticut, warns that, “The deep structural forces that brought us the current political crisis have not gone away.”

His research, which uses maths and science to predict socio-political/historical events, forecasts many years of political turmoil, peaking in the 2020s. It isn’t a disease we caught but the existing structures that are leading us there. On the bright side, he says, “Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly…This means that we can avoid the worst – perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.”

So let’s pray to all see the light.

Here’s wishing you a real annus mirabilis, fully focused on saving ourselves.

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