On mutually assured survival

(First published in the T&T Guardian on September 28, 2022)

It may well have been the case that Caricom leaders had strategised to weave a vast multitude of questions into the chaotic underside of the Caribbean embroidery at the UN General Assembly debate which closed on Monday.

However, the knots and ragged snips and dissonant entanglements required to produce at the frontside, a partial, yet seductively healthful view of the whole remained on full display.

To be certain, both our hemispheric neighbours, and those beyond, too frequently lease a homogeneous Caribbean visage of their own design. Initially, as cover for brutalities of the past, and latterly as deception to escape complicity and responsibility.

It could not be, we once thought, that even those who shared major hurts of our disturbed past could now be seated at the table, two elbows away, and be despising us.

It is the stuff of diplomatic routine to negotiate such multi-polarities. Ambivalence bred by both self-interest and the prospects for mutually assured survival in the face of undeniable interdependence.

In what ways are the stories of Venezuela and Nicaragua and Cuba not our own, was the gist of Ralph Gonsalves’ retort. To what degree are Russian depravities at its borders irrelevant to Gaston Browne’s admonitions regarding the increasingly anachronistic Security Council?

In what ways, as Dickon Mitchell urged, do we harness the value of youth and the rich harvest they may bring.

T&T’s Amery Browne notably cited the scourge of transnational, organised crime without, as was required I must say, substantially dissecting the hemispheric dynamics that facilitate it.

Instead, like almost everyone else, he went for the scattershot, knowing full well that officially appointed dissent would ritualistically fall short of anything resembling a competent response or rebuttal.

It may have been that the joint regional brief was to cast a wide fine-mesh net to signal a vast terrain of limitless priorities. But, as with the fisherfolk out at sea, we are not always best served by the resulting catch. In too many ways a hierarchy of needs is assured disorder especially when everything, as is the current case, is proposed as a priority.

Ironically, we have also been undecided, at the height of the pandemic for example, whether we, as a regional community, should ride the waves or crash against the same heavy seas on different vessels.

Successive collective bubbles either popped or contracted to the size of smaller spaces. There are even those who would have preferred smaller capsules – in the process leading the charge of destructive denialism and applauding tragic failure.

Of course, to those who pursue other destinies, none of this really matters. We can tell by the way you grasp that passport or how you frame partisan desire. We got to know you well – deformed shadows in the face of approaching light. Laughing emojis at the sight of tragedy and pain.

All this as an unapologetic response to those who picked up on the prospects for hope this page has attempted to offer in recent weeks. Complete repudiation of the notions of a “lost generation” and of a “failed race.”

So it is with our embrace of the world, self-validation is needed in consort with far greater self-confidence. The UNGA presents an opportunity to say what about the challenges is new and unique and to explain why the disparate vessels of change may collide and be lost at sea.

This, to me, requires far more diligent management of all the processes involved when it comes to our Caribbean future. The banal challenges fed by fear and an absence of fraternity are not among the least important of the assignment.

Here in Kingston, where I am briefly, the battle cries persist despite the recent, gratuitously displayed full mast of white flags. In Georgetown, a single flag, not all, is soaking in the rich mud these days.

What has been uttered in New York is but a faint spectre of what pierces our silence here at home. There remain many who believe that we sink or swim on our solitary own. Changing all of this can make the difference between sad conclusions and our mutually assured survival.