Looking beneath the lines

THE EDITOR: We have often been labelled a happy-go-lucky people, all for a fete and a rum and roti, with little civic consciousness about the real issues that affect our everyday living.

In this letter I invite some of our readers to debunk that stigma and look, critically, beneath the issues and ideas listed below and draw their own informed conclusions.

1. “We coming for you,” after a senior government official is attacked with hundreds suffering their own pain from such attacks without a word to them from higher up.

2. Is there a kind of poetic/karmic justice in the affairs of men, unseen and mysterious, responding to babies dying and young mothers continuing to wail and cry for want of redress?

3. Crime is down to the deepest hell under the watch of a senior official who has been reappointed to take us to high heaven and free us of its clutches.

4. Solving crime is eradicating not only the criminal, but a long evolving mindset shaped by those who should have provided the solutions but did not, which could now take a lifetime.

5. You sacrifice to pay your property tax before the deadline but the would-be offender is now being given the leeway of reneging if he has not received an assessment notice, in which case he does not have to pay.

6. Cricket is our life as West Indians but while enjoying the CPL game at the Oval they were busy wrecking our cars – as much as we were abandoned at Brian Lara during the World Cup, the buses not returning, and being left to find our way in the dead of night at the mercy of criminals.

7. The once idyllic Tobago is now paradise lost, according to one newspaper, and a haven for criminals.

8. A dissenting voice in our politics is a recipe for elimination as one political party has recently demonstrated.

9. The physical safety of students is the first duty of the principals in our schools, according to the Education Act, but do the abandoned La Fillette school, the floods at St George's College and, worst of all, the gunplay around a kindergarten in Malick, inter alia, not speak volumes of the leadership at the top in this regard?

10. Is there a contradiction between awards galore and the current state of our country?

My take on these randomly selected issues and ideas is fairly obvious, but the intent, more so, is to let the perpetrators involved in the many areas of our national life referred to above, know that as a people we are not so dumb after all, lacking the critical insight to read between the lines and see what lies beneath.

What, dear reader, is your take?

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

via e-mail