Celebrate today, forget tomorrow

PAOLO KERNAHAN

FOR EVERY challenge facing us as a people, if we put our minds to it – we can forget them all.

We've perfected sidestepping our troubles ever faster, swinging from one catastrophe to the next with a blinding pace and astonishing apathy.

A lifetime ago I was in the grocery at Christmas time. 'Twas the season to be blotto, so my friends and I were there to stock up on our preferred (read cheapest) intoxicants to fuel frivolity. In the cashier's queue ahead of us was then UWI lecturer Denis Solomon, acerbic political and social commentator and one of the finest minds this country ever produced.

As the then host of the Morning Edition television show, I'd interviewed Solomon on multiple occasions. It was only right to fight my customary urge for people-avoidance to say hello.

I needn't have bothered. Denis cast a scornful eye at my grocery cart filled to bursting with booze, ice and other accoutrements of vice and grumbled, "Yes! Drink up! Celebrate!"

At that moment I felt as small as the excrement of a fly...in the ocean. Another thought occurred to me as well, though – please don't ever allow me to become caraille-level bitter about life.

Fast-forward several years and I've come to realise that it wasn't bitterness speaking that day. With age, at least for some of us, comes the depth of reckoning of how well and truly screwed we are in this country.

There is a pervasive tendency to trivialise important issues and shuffle on from scandals and tragedies without a scintilla of introspection. Such selective amnesia is the paid passage to ruin.

When the story emerged of a tea party staged by the TT Association of Women Police, CoP Erla Harewood-Christopher fumbled to distance herself from the event: "Not my tea party!" – that was the caption accompanying the photo of the commissioner in attendance at the said event – staged at her official residence.

This demonstrated poor judgment on her part. She didn't consider the optics of a tea party amid a bloody crime surge. The fact that Christopher, occupying one of the most important roles in this country, can't see the problem with her involvement, indirect though it may have been, is troubling.

Even more worrying is the number of government apologists slavishly excusing this insanity online.

"So just because of everything going on that means people shouldn't enjoy themselves?" There was also this one, "...must she stop celebrating life because of the crime situation? Life is short!"

It's certainly shorter for some than others.

The police service asks the public to partner with law enforcement in the war against criminals. Yet the TTPS sends mixed signals with the strident defence of a mistimed event. The CoP and those in her charge showed a callous indifference to the suffering of citizens in the chokehold of a criminal insurrection.

Society suffers the uselessness of misfit leaders wedged into their roles like corks into keyholes. Still, they take comfort and cues from leaders above who are themselves incapable and walled off from the ravages of their insouciance.

The Prime Minister can flit from one golf course to another, disappear for inordinate periods, even in times of crisis – only to resurface with incendiary, divisive remarks rooted in nothing other than his wholly inutile default of toxic political invective. Those who can, do; those who can't blame everyone else except themselves.

There is a howling vacuum of governance at the top. Consequently, this spreads through government agencies and departments like mould. Roads fall apart, homes burn down for lack of fire tenders or water, citizens must save their own skins from floods, families go hungry – all because "we in charge!" but no one will take charge. No one accepts responsibility at the very top; this not-me-nah ethos sets the tone for dereliction of duty everywhere.

The Paria diving tragedy, the Vincent Nelson and Faris Al-Rawi fiasco, a galloping murder toll – all this is going on while the State has turned its back on the people.

We, the people, have turned our backs on ourselves. Inertia becomes a defence mechanism against hardship.

The roles are reversed now. Today I stand where Denis Solomon stood; my head is heavy with the weight of all I know and have seen.

Behind me is the population with baskets filled with distractions and the burning intent to move on from troubles that will always be at our throats.