Brian Lara's bold stand

PAOLO KERNAHAN

THE FACT that Brian Lara weighed in on the crime rampage is more significant than most people understand.

Many people were quick to condemn Lara's timing. The inference among quite a few was he'd been silent all along while the butcher's bill was adding up.

Emotions being what they are at the moment, it's reasonable to see how people could misconstrue Lara's remarks and underestimate their significance.

This man is, arguably, one of the greatest cricketers of all time. Lara is a true national hero in a nation stuffed with pseudo-celebrities powered by meaningless "accomplishments" and boundless hubris.

There's no bigger platform than his mouth. All he needed to do was to send a press release to the newspapers. Publication of his heartfelt sentiments spread like a stadium wave across social media. This is all the more consequential given Lara's reserved nature – which borders on pathological.

I worked in the media for more than 20 years. I never interviewed Lara, nor did I ever even see him anywhere near the media houses where I worked. He is an intensely private person, even as his life attracted highly invasive scrutiny and speculation.

Lara is a titan in this country's landscape, transcending the sporting world in which he made his name. For him, at the age of 54, to shrug off his reticence and speak unreservedly about crime is a big deal.

Moreover, Lara is friendly with the Prime Minister. Legend has it that he and the PM play golf together periodically. Lara, either consciously or subconsciously, took a calculated risk of incurring the ire of not just Rowley but PNM orcs who interpret any sort of criticism as a slight against the house of the balisier. To offend the PNM in PNM country is to court pariahdom.

Lara's expression of the hurt he feels over the path this country has taken is the very definition of batting outside one's crease.

His public statement must also be examined in the context of many others who occupy lofty, influential positions in a society whose silence borders on criminal negligence.

As an example, during the Manning and Persad-Bissessar administrations, there was no shortage of respected columnists who would write fearlessly and fiercely about crime, failed governance, corruption, etc. Today that number has dwindled to just a handful. The opinion pages are, for the most part, filled with the random musings of spent forces whose meandering perspectives bear no resemblance to the grim realities stalking the population.

The PM's admission that "some anti-crime measures are failing" should offer no solace. First of all, aside from routine seizures of guns and ammunition, it isn't clear what "measures" he was referring to; he wasn't asked to elaborate. either. Excluding occasional successes with arms seizures, there's no discernible evidence of an active crime-reduction strategy happening across the country. The police service, by all appearances, is applying peacetime policing in a wartime environment.

What the public sees are the usual optics – knee-jerk reactions like ephemeral spikes in police presence in certain areas.

These eventually revert to the normal state of things; officers take up their customary places inside police stations as public attention evaporates.

The simple fact is we've been suffering this failure for years now. The Government has unapologetically imposed upon us the living failure of Fitzgerald Hinds, whose incompetence carries real consequences. The PM is more interested in preserving the appearance of authority and dominance than in saving the lives of citizens by choosing politics over competence.

As the country spirals through the nine circles of hell, we're constantly reminded that there's no bottom to the brutality and apathy that are our twin defining traits. The discovery of a partially decomposed body in the Queen's Park Savannah should tell you we have further still yet to fall.

There is a point of no return, however. It can be argued that we may have already passed it.

I am grateful Brian Lara has added his considerable voice to the conversation. Hopefully, he will inspire others to do the same until there's a chorus of discontent so loud that the PM can't possibly hurl his contempt in our faces and ride off into indifference on his golf cart.

There is no such thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time any more. The entire nation is the wrong place – we're all at risk as death draws closer.