Crime and collapsing society

THE EDITOR: National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds has said the nation is experiencing “a severe level of crime.” The minister is, of course, correct, and he must be commended for having the courage to finally admit this alarming state of affairs.

I write to offer the view that runaway crime in TT is the consequence of a "collapsing society" and neither the Government nor the political opposition, nor the police can either reverse that collapse or arrest it.

I am not alone in offering this view. “Captain,” said Gypsy, “the ship is sinking.” “If this is progress,” asked King Austin, “how long will it last?”

The secular model of a society, and of a state, which the people of TT inherited during British colonial rule, and since so-called independence, is one which marginalised the role and function of religion in public affairs and in the establishment of a healthy and stable social order. Britain is now an atheist society with churches, cathedrals and monasteries on sale every day.

When the British government in TT was surprisingly persuaded, during the period when Roy Joseph was minister of education, to allow religion a role in the system of education, the result was a rare success; yet he was demonised by the new Oxford-educated political order in 1956 and consigned to the political cemetery.

Those who live the religious way of life recognise absolute truth to have come from the Lord-God, and that the State and the society must be established on the foundation of absolute truth. People who live the religious way of life cannot swear allegiance to a secular constitution as the supreme truth.

If those who fashioned the TT Constitution had the wisdom to recognise the presence of three major religions (Christianity, Hinduism and Islam) in TT to be an asset rather than a liability, then provisions would have been made for an independent voice of all three religions in Parliament, and scholars of these three religions could have warned the State and the society all through these more than 60 years of independent statehood that TT was moving in the direction of eventual societal collapse.

The die was cast long ago, complete with the ever-increasing vulgarity of Carnival (the steelband and Carnival are inseparable) and there is now no turning back for TT. Elections make no difference.

My view, with which of course the critics are likely to differ, is that safety, security and, indeed, survival now require withdrawal from a collapsing society with the creation of small, self-sufficient, God-fearing communities in the remote countryside.

The secular state and secular society should then be left to solve their problem of a crime-riddled collapsing society, even while some dance naked on the streets.

IMRAN N HOSEIN

via e-mail