Una propuesta modesta

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

Con apologias a Jonathan Swift y su propio Modest Proposal

BC PIRES

ALMOST 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal for Providing for Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. Swift, recognising Catholic Ireland in 1729 faced a potato famine causing hundreds of thousands of deaths while an equal number of babies were being born, proposed (modestly) that Irish starvation and overpopulation might easily cancel one another out if, instead of trying to feed hungry children, people simply started eating them.

In one unforgettable paragraph, Swift was “..assured a young healthy child well-nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled: and...will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.”

Swift argued 120K children “may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth be males, which is more than we allow to sheep or swine” since these children “are seldom the fruits of marriage.” The remainder of poor Irish children, he suggested, could “be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune.”

So, given our own twin challenges of 1. far too many hungry Venezuelans entering Trinidad and Tobago to the extreme annoyance of many radio “presenters” (who are themselves entirely unpresentable, and whose stock in trade is thinly veiled hatred); and 2. the Coast Guard being seemingly unable to stop more rickety boats bringing even more collapsible Venes, whom we regard the way the English in 1729 regarded Irish children who were “seldom the fruits of marriage,” I make my own Modest Proposal.

Remembering that, only this week, our valiant Coast Guard was forced or tricked into accidentally shooting dead a baby boy, Yaelvis Santoyo Sarabia, when firing live ammo at a boatload of hidden illegal migrants posing as refugees, and understanding that this hidden boat of openly Venezuelan aggressors had tried repeatedly and antagonistically to ram a boat that belonged to the Coast Guard, an unprovoked act of provocation (not counting the very reasonable number of shots fired by the Coast Guard into the air, except for that one bullet to the baby’s head/mother’s chest), and, finally, given that the Coast Guard’s duty is to protect Trinidad from invasion by foreign Vene sufferer forces, I make this Propuesta Modesta:

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Children of Poor Vene People from Being a Burden to Their Parents and for Making Them Beneficial to the Trinidad y Tobacco Coast Guard.

Instead of our Coast Guard trying to PREVENT illegal Vene boats carrying expendable Vene sufferers from entering our waters, our Coast Guard should allow them to enter freely…and then use them for practising naval manoeuvres.

Now you might argue that no amount of practice could improve the accuracy of marksmen already skilled enough to shoot dead a baby in the arms of its mother without also killing her, and while actually aiming above the boat and/or at its engines; but I would reply that, the more polished our intrepid Coast Guard gets, the faster its efficiency will improve, thereby drastically reducing the number of people illegally entering the country (at least alive).

You might argue that, if boats bringing illegal Venes to burden the Trinidadian taxpayer were freely allowed into national waters, it might become problematic to treat them as dangerous enough to warrant shooting at, but I need only point out that the Coast Guard’s media release on the death of little Yaelvis shows great skill at insinuatingly portraying unarmed desperate civilians fleeing slow starvation as military combatants; and that these Venes committed multiple acts of actual if trifling aggression and implied if not actual atrocity while hiding below the gunwale of the invading boat as it fled.

Finally, and I hope convincingly, I point out that this form of practice exercise has been proven to work exceedingly well by the TT Police Service in ghettos all over Trinidad.

Should my proposal be favourably received, I take the liberty of informing the National Security Minister that I accept payment only in dolares Estados Unidos.

BC Pires is obviously a traitor and looks suspiciously like he might habla un poco de espanol. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com