The Pothole at the Roundabout

There is a small “roundabout” along the Saddle Road in Santa Cruz, constructed some years ago to address habitual recklessness at an intersection that grew busier as the years passed.

On Saturday, the car in front of mine suddenly avoided the diversion and sped through the wrong side of the encircled area and went its way. We steupsed as I correctly began negotiating the roundabout at my typically irritating snail’s pace.

Halfway in, the left front wheel of my car hit a pothole that threatened rim, shocks, suspension, and passengers in one go. “That’s why!” I thought to myself. I took my licks and drove on.

Another pothole not far away offered the remote, sadistic prospect of a solid aim by the transgressor in front who had by then long disappeared.

By that time, I had already begun contemplating the difficulty of an August 31 newspaper column given successive escapes from such responsibility through fortuitous timing over the years.

Where existed, I had been thinking, the perfect metaphor? On which current experience could I negotiate a suitable turn of phrase? I had read a week of columns and social media commentary comprising no shortage of gaslighting, trolling and manufactured disgust.

Sure, there have also recently been (failed) campaigns hinged on COVID denial, vaccine hesitancy and concerted resistance to every single official intervention.

The accompanying false narrative of lone, isolated, punitive national actions and of our own supposed “overkill.” All now exposed as cynical partisan narratives aimed at some kind of political advantage. So, no longer need to go there.

There is also, more recently, the sticky, leaky, painful bandage of collective punishment on the scrap metal industry, destructively resisted with absolutely no reference to the obnoxious reality of hanging phone lines and disfigured lampposts everywhere we turn.

The amateurish concealment of preference as professional commentary also lies in wait like a Santa Cruz pothole – know it only when you feel it or, like I usually do (yet not on Saturday), spot it from a distance.

So, yes! The pothole at the roundabout!

On previous (rare) occasions, I have cited CLR and Best and Williams and (Dennis) Pantin who all shared the view that the challenges of social, political and economic independence could not be engaged without an understanding of a vision of society beyond mere recitation of noble constitutional aspirations.

For, every time you see the word “vision”, there is fast and easy but usually futile resort to the amorphous values of the watchwords: Discipline, Production and Tolerance.

There is also easy reference to displays of the national flag and daily declamation of the National Pledge (once touted as effective instruments of the social engineering of children) – all things we did at primary school in the 1960s and which made no difference in the manner in which we conducted public and private life while building the foundations for today’s dysfunctionalities.

All of us who witnessed the polite, correctly spelled and enunciated embrace of inequity, bigotry and privilege are often amazed at pronouncements about “the good old days.”

It’s among the myths to be dispelled. In it contains a hankering for what amounts to a case of collective Stockholm Syndrome defined by persistent, unspoken depravities we dare not find time to expose.

This finds us, among other things, repeatedly (and proudly) complaining about ourselves to others. “Naughty, we’ve been naughty. Spank us, please.” Spank us, Privy Council. Whip our butts, Embassy. Tap us on the head, United Nations. Bring out the tambran whip, OAS!

So, today - Santa Cruz pothole and “vision” in mind – I turn not to Williams or Best or CLR or Pantin but to Donric Williamson aka Lord Funny.

His classic calypso of 1987 – ‘How You Feel’ - was irresistible as artistic expression at a time of political change amidst looming social and economic change. It sounded alerts that were roundly ignored at the time.

Despite the admonitions of ‘How You Feel’, we barreled through the wrong side of the roundabout and, by 1990, even those who had tried to stay the course had hit a tragic pothole lower down the road, sustaining irreversible damage.

Some of us went around and around getting nowhere as efficiently as we had arrived at the juncture.

Funny captured the timelessness of the development challenge, not having inherited the best of circumstances but confident that change was possible.

“You feel that we just keep moving on, or backing back on we heel … 25 (60) years have gone, how you feel?” There is a pothole at the roundabout waiting for we.