The bandage of collective punishment

Whatever the responses to the collective punishment administered on people, communities, and sectors such as the scrap metal industry, there is sometimes validity in ensuring that fissures evident in the public space are bandaged beyond the visible wounds, while lasting treatments are conceived and applied.

Provided the intervention is not as injurious or as vandalistic as the condition it was meant to address, and restoration is promptly achieved, I believe a society can benefit from such actions.

No doubt, as is the case of scrap metals, complicity is far wider than the core suspects. The absence of key interventions has had the effect of normalising wrong-doing and widening the net of complicity.

But the debasing of daily life to limp vulgarly severed cables wherever you go symptomizes a malaise that’s deep and tragic. If in your advocacy against the measures this does not constitute a key part of your messaging, you affirm your role in the depravity it depicts.

I am not, of course, speaking about “collective punishment” of the Geneva Conventions kind. No one is being maimed or killed, however tempting the metaphors. I am also not blind to available civil remedies. But none of the required mitigation includes the act of mashing up the country.

Both the open and barely concealed criminal threats that have emerged since the suspension of the scrap metal sector also, by themselves, compel its necessity.

I would add that it’s time to apply similar constraints on a number of other vexatious public issues. This is nothing brand new. In the 1980s, in order to ration foreign currency, we expanded the negative list to include, among other things, imported fruits.

There were undeniable impacts on the conduct of business, valid claims of corporate victimhood, and evident restraints of trade may have been considered. But Peter footed the bill for Paul and Paul eventually paid for us all.

Global trade rules now seriously challenge the thought, but the emerging Caricom agriculture space offers an opportunity not unlike the self-sufficiency that flashed briefly before our eyes in the mid-1980s. 

So, in a real sense, we are used to measures that impose prohibitions while financial, social and other crises are addressed. Some may appear punitive in nature (the suspension of scrap metal exports, for example) while others constitute a withdrawal of privileges.

My friend, writer/editor Fazeela Mollick however reminds me that, in any event, “some things that are set in train, are difficult to halt, but not impossible if the will is there.”

I have taken some time to come to the point of all this because it is important to have some context against which an increasingly popular campaign has been set.

The punchline is this: I think it is time for a comprehensive moratorium on the importation, sale and use of all pyrotechnics except where necessary for purposes of civil protection and national defence.

This has nothing to do with individual preference – though I find this fascination with noise and colourful explosions to be expensive, self-indulgent nonsense, made personally worse by the fact of my exposure to fatal gunfire some years ago.

I visited the Emperor Valley Zoo on Saturday and noted the signs everywhere you turned calling for a ban on fireworks. I have attended to my pet cat as she trembled under a table for hours. I know people who have suffered the loss of pet dogs. I am aware of the impact of sudden, loud noises on wild animals.

On January 5, this space applauded Yesenia’s newspaper silence and ushered in the New Year with the following wild prediction: “On December 31, 2022, there will be firecrackers, “squibs”, bamboo bursting, and unauthorised use of fireworks almost everywhere in T&T.

“Animals will cower, and some will die. A house or two will burn. A teenager will suffer injury to his/her hearing/vision.

“The police will not respond to complaints. A government official will promise yet another inquiry or legislative review.”

Four weeks short of my prediction, all hell seems set to break loose by this time next week. This space has been used to chronicle the periodic outbursts of promise from the highest quarters. It has also recorded spectacular failures.

I am willing to take bets on this. Make me rich. Banning the fireworks may be considered to be an act of collective punishment to address the misbehaviour of a few, but it can bandage some existing wounds on our humanity. It can help, however little, to rescue us from what looks like imminent scrap heaps and carnage.