Trini social distancing

A woman in West Mall (before the lockdown) saw two women to whom she occasionally nodded in the church car park, walking towards her. Ahead of the Trinidad governmental curve, justifiably nervous about covid19, she crossed to walk in front of shop entrances on the other side.

She nodded at the women across the bench separating the hallways as they passed one another; but the women turned away, noses in the air. One of them turned to her companion, and, pointing with her mouth across the bench to the woman, said, “She social, eh?”

Trini social distancing.

A fair-skinned man arrived at a branch of the supermarket which, after the lockdown, had non-skid tape marking the two-metre distances shoppers should keep between one another at the line for the cash registers. A security guard grudgingly (properly) allowed in, one by one, only as many customers as came out.

People waiting to go in respected the order of arrivals; but people inside came out only slowly while people outside arrived fairly quickly. Unconsciously worried about losing their place in the “line,” the crowd unwittingly gathered close together at the door.

The fair-skinned man, from two metres away, smiling, said, “It ent make no sense to stand two metres apart at the cash register if we jamming up like we pushing pan here by the door!” A man in the crowd glared, wagged his finger at the fair-skinned man.

“Paul, yuh mother come,” he sneered. “Ent is the Doc say, ‘Massa day done!'”

Two or three heads in the crowd nodded vigorously.

“Firetrucking one per cent,” snapped a man.

“Eat yuh BMW now, nuh,” jeered another.

Trini social-distancing.

A Cabinet minister got so much blows for bringing back a boatload of nationals with certain and/or possible covid19 cases from one island that, when he heard about a “next set” of Trinis stranded on “a next” island, he tell himself, “Not a firetruck of that! I learn my lesson from the cruise ship passengers! Let them cool theyself right there! Who send you? Why it is we to bring you back? Catch you falling self and pay you own blasted hotel bill!”

The prime minister of Barbados (through her Attorney General), putting even more distance between herself and all the other Caricom leaders, graciously takes in the not so much “stateless” as “stay right there, lest you get we sick” Trinis (even if they are taken into quarantine). The most deeply shaming stories since “Trinidad and Tobago is not an ATM for Caricom”, which merely set out the facts, appear in the newspapers in Barbados, Jamaica and Guyana.

Trini social-distancing.

A man who made his living (some say made himself rich, if only fleetingly) from playing himself on television, in his full King of Carnival/comess costume comprised of suit jackets four sizes too small, white plastic Cadillac windscreen sunglasses and bamcee-squeezer, ankle-breezer pants, made a video tearfully confessing he “had it” – and all the empathy in the Town he claims to run vanished, like hot hops bread.

Almost anybody else could get a common cold and coax a little, “Oh, Gorm!” out of almost everybody else. But not an imps from Central “making as eef” he really from Westmoorings; no concern for him. If a man dress himself like a Good Friday bobolee, well, give the bobolee what the bobolee wants: beat him ’til he black and blue!

Is genuine blows on top of a possibly dubious perhaps fatal infection. Lick your (possibly self-inflicted) wounds, if you like, but take your licks. Know your cockroach place and don’t come in fowl business.

And, yes, we are accustomed to all of the above, we may even like it so. And, yes, those appalling self-shot, self-directed, self-starring videos, featuring hand-lettered copybook-paper signs held aloft, intended for the lower-thirds and lowest common denominator, will be as damaging to the child cameraman as their own shootouts are for the child soldiers of Africa.

But you have to wonder what will happen next if, in the earliest days of the travails that will go on for weeks, if not months, the first casualties are truth and empathy.

BC Pires is the president of the Human Being, Especially Flawed Human Beings, Fan Club.