Taking care of our things

One of my childhood friends was known for supreme diligence when attending to his belongings. It provided a basis for our bullying and teasing. He became something of a loner in later life. After all, which child puts away his toys after play? Who puts sweetie wrappers in the bin?

As a teen, he wore only crisp, clean clothing and was mercilessly jeered when one day he was witnessed ironing his underwear. By contrast, the rest of us wore unwashed jeans for months and months, until they stank and could basically stand on their own.

“Take care of your things, like David (not his real name),” my mother would tell the five of us.

For some strange reason, this childhood memory returned to me while I was being driven around the perimeter of the UWI Campus in St Augustine two weekends ago.

These days, I would typically be zooming past the area bemasked, dodging potholes, pedestrians, and distracted drivers. But on this day, en route to Macoya Market (where an ugly patch job at the entrance is not good enough), I was being driven by my wife. So, I had time to look around. It broke my heart to witness the condition of the campus buildings.

There were rusty, old galvanise sheets on one of the older buildings and moss and grime on the walls of the newer ones. Yes, the fields were mown, and the internal roadways seemed to be in relatively good shape. But the buildings appeared to have been neglected in their pandemic emptiness.

It occurred to me, during this outing, that the wider human condition in this COVID-19 era presents the requirement of taking better care of our things. My wife used the engineering term “built environment” when I stumbled with the distinction between all the “things” that needed care at this time.

If the pandemic has established one important life lesson, it is that the compartments we usually construct for human, natural and ‘built’ environments are a misguided illusion. Environmental scientists, for example, look critically at the dynamics at play when built infrastructure interacts with nature, and generate consequential impacts on the wellbeing of human populations. This is in fact the climate change story.

There is a concern, for instance, about the impact of built spaces on biological diversity and its implications for human wellness, both physical and mental. Leave a pothole long enough in the middle of the road and witness its impact on the quality of driving and other citizen behaviour.

In Aranguez, the taxi drivers are buying cement and fixing the potholes themselves. This brings more value to community life than the preservation of shocks and suspension systems. But it does not take the ministry of works off the hook. Its atrocious lethargy and neglect, in tandem with local government inaction and the recklessness of WASA, are among the more significant slurs on our humanity.

It should also bother us greatly that some communities are burning tyres on the road. This is not easily dismissible as mere partisan activism. Nobody really earns any points.

The wider metaphor of negligence is also encapsulated in the pandemic response. That political gain could have been envisaged in the promotion of COVID-denial, subversion of pandemic measures and now, vaccine hesitancy signals a willingness to engage in acts of reckless vandalism in the absence of a duty of care.

The reality is that we generally do not have the best record when it comes to taking care of our things. It’s expressed in our attitude toward “maintenance” of the built environment, but also in our predisposition when it comes to nature and to people.

For example, last week’s assault on pets and wild animals, the ill, and the elderly painted a worst-case scenario. It’s now a huge farce to hear of “zero tolerance” on the unlawful and reckless use of fireworks and “scratch-bombs.”

Here I have been decrying the defence of “tradition” and calling for a wholesale ban on everything from bamboo-busting to the use of “scratch-bombs” to the deployment of unregulated fireworks. All of these things – from care for our built environment to respect for other humans – are interrelated.

Today, we are faced with a pandemic which requires we proceed with care and caution. I am not seeing us, as a collective, doing very well on this score. True, the climate change conversation finds the world short on thoughtfulness. But we, in T&T, are simply not taking care of our things, including ourselves.