French vs Trini culture of protest

PAOLO KERNAHAN

IF EMMANUEL MACRON had Trinis to deal with, the streets would be dead kwart.

Still stink, though.

Nearly a million French citizens flooded the streets in opposition to a law raising the pension age from 62 to 64. Protesters young and old joined the resistance, which has become combustible. Centuries-old landmark buildings have been torched as working-class people push back against the broadly unpopular adjustment.

There are also nationwide strikes paralysing refineries, rail transport, air travel, schools and sanitation. What's interesting is the number of young people on the front lines of this revolt, even though the retirement age is a bit remote for them – but it goes beyond the pensionable age.

Last October, public disorder over rising costs of living swept France. Tsunamis of humanity thronged the streets in a unified show of force against oppressive economic conditions burdening the working class.

The only way you'd get the same number of Trinis on the streets is through one of two ways – either feathers, beads and booze are involved, or the snarled traffic of a day of total policing; or, if you prefer, total wage negotiations. Sounds like a cheap shot, sure, but truth feels that way sometimes.

Think about it:the most powerful union in the country stood by as the Government shuttered the Petrotrin refinery – a move previously thought an impossibility.

We weren't always that easygoing, though.

Only one term earlier, under the People's Partnership, the same union held the country by the throat as it pressed for wage increases for refinery workers. The then government capitulated, coughing up hikes for workers who would, years later, be scattered to the winds by a PNM government that bypassed the union like a full bus. Go figure.

Even "father of the nation" Patrick Manning wasn't spared the ire of torch-bearing mobs. The din of repudiation over Calder Hart, emperor of Udecott, the planned smelters and Manning's mage Juliana Pena became deafening. All that was needed was for Manning's "raging bull" Keith Rowley to add his voice to the chorus of acrimony and it was game over.

Today, crime is the worst it has ever been, but still not bad enough. Shortly after announcing the police service will make a dent in serious crime in mere months, the newly-minted CoP asked people to pull out their chaplets. Still not a peep from the sheep.

This government nominates a dyed-in-the-wool worshipful master of the PNM, Christine Kangaloo, as the next president of this idiocracy. Kangaloo is on record as singing psalms of spreading the gospels of the PNM across the land – proselytising fervently like some streetcorner preacher.

Yet she assures she has relinquished her party fealty; so Kangaloo becomes a PNM apostate overnight and the population swallows that like a shot of puncheon.

This government is, without question, the most inept, autocratic and perfidious administration in the history of this nation. Yet Rowley and his band of maladroit political hustlers have had the easiest ride of it.

In a public forum, Finance Minister Colm Imbert, when speaking of fiscal screw-turning measures, famously said, "They haven't rioted yet..." The public washed that down with one of Imbert's trademark smirks.

By stark contrast, the billionaire French president Macron (who has now taken to hiding his watch in public) collected a hot one across the face from an irate member of the public.

This isn't advocacy of violence, but a reminder that politicians, no matter how elevated, are hired by the people to do a job. They're not deserving of any automatic reverence or respect.

So where has the voice of the TT people gone? It's quite simple, really. When people voted for the People's Partnership, they somehow got it into their heads that this was the dawn of a halcyon age of propriety.

When that government followed the well-rutted road of corruption, cronyism and squandermania, people threw up their hands. Kamla Persad-Bissessar and her lot squandered the goodwill of the public like a Lotto winner at a brothel.

Citizens believe they did their job by voting the PP out; constant vigilance is now someone else's job.

Under the PNM, people's appetite for protest switched to an appetite for abuse and interminable suffering. That's why Rowley can live the carefree golfing and goating lifestyle and his ministers retain the comforts and perks of office even as the country slides irrevocably into the abyss. Unlike the French, we're too jaded, lazy or self-interested to revolt – even if it's to save ourselves.