The fear factor

There is a constant call - amid the outrageous and macabre developments of recent days, month, and years - to avoid an irresistible urge to yield to fear and a sense of diminished hope on questions of social peace, cohesion, and calm.

For certain, the impact of fear can contribute to the undermining of the confidence and resilience required to advance any country’s development agenda.

But it is clearly inadvisable to suggest that fear can be seamlessly and elastically enjoined to statistical performance or gratuitous expressions of political assurance. Things just do not work that way.

You see, the minute fear is casually dismissed as baseless irrationality or described as being cynically contrived there are always realities guaranteed to smack you in the gut and stomp on your steel-tipped toes. Witness the last few days.

Last week in this space, in citing several instances that conspired to establish such a point, I concluded that pervasive recklessness – to put it mildly - had conspired to transform daily life here into a precarious, often deadly gamble.

Between then and now have come more killing; claiming in the process the lives of children, discovery of mass, apparently unlawful human burials, and the brutally audacious “security breach” (speak of euphemism) at the San Fernando Municipal Police Station. Among other things.

A subsequent newspaper photo-op featuring two government ministers, the commissioner of police, a coast guard officer, and other security personnel marching resolute and shoulder to shoulder must have tempted the caption: “Never fear. We are here.”

But I am yet to witness unreserved purchase of the goods on display.

Fear and panic, the commissioner had proposed just one week prior, are just as bad as crime itself. “Why aren’t people feeling that (the statistics)? Why isn’t anyone talking about that? Because fear has gripped this country for so long that we can’t even see when change is coming,” the commissioner said.

Guilty, as charged! We all seemed to respond. For credibility is earned not through selective application of favourable data – and one may wish to cite unreferenced, appallingly low criminal detection rates and bland efforts to determine and influence causative factors – but through the comfort of believing that somebody is in charge and people are taking joint responsibility through knowledge, resources, and individual capacity.

Such assets include truth-telling of the highest calibre. Who, for instance, really believes that the current, extended state of public emergency was constitutionally justifiable as a way to address grand, specific existential threats? Where is the progress report on this?

Even so, we are instead being told that all of this can be expected to generate concurrent (not just core) benefits. This has been an argument that has spanned at least 15 years, across the political divide.

Yet, the “updates” have grown to focus exclusively on statistical gains related to matters outside the purported threats for which there was extreme recourse. Instead, what was meant to be a very last resort on specific constitutional grounds has now become a readily available default for everything else. As asked right here last week: In the face of growing fear and a sense of futility, what do you do for an encore?

Additionally, I recall in the years following the murderous assault of July 1990 numerous admonitions, including from this writer, to resist the temptation to reduce all of this to the status of political row and advantage.

Blood, we are constantly being told, remains a stain on the hands of politicians and not necessarily smeared on the walls of civic institutions from school to community centre to places of worship.

“Solving crime” has since become more firmly entrenched as manifesto bullet points, verses, and chapters. Political opportunity has been grasped with both hands.

People have clamoured for “the good old days” of the heavy hand (or ropes) around our necks, and election campaigns with five-year cycles have responded accordingly.

Meanwhile, those under whose portfolios reside obligations to address such challenges would do well to spurn the temptation to announce victory on the battlefront even as the war continues.