A flag at the CPL

Many of us have been paying close attention to the progress of cricket franchises over the past few weeks in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL). The contest moves to Guyana today.

Friends who know my obstinate views on this have been quick to point out that what is important is who “hosts” the respective cricketing business enterprises and not who comprises the various teams. Good point.

This, they say, is the important factor to bear in mind. Fine, because it supports my point. This is not like other major sporting franchises where cities (and not countries) act as hosts – IPL, Big Bash, NFL, La Liga, EPL etc.

So, how did “national pride” and “patriotism” come into this?

The trouble is, since I raised this in the early years, such irrational passions have intensified. For example, when I switched allegiance from the “T&T Amazon Warriors” (my joke) to TKR this season (btw, there’s no country anywhere in the world named “Trinbago”), my friends and colleagues in the oil-rich South American republic were quick to brand the transition as treasonous.

It’s just that when Pakistani-American Ali Khan bowled Barbadian batsman Shai Hope during last week’s encounter at Queen’s Park Oval, I found it hard to visualise a vigorously waved T&T flag as a naturally occurring, sensible part of the picture.

Correspondingly, I cannot recall anything of the sort during the West Indies Rising Stars Under 15s Championship earlier this year. This event featured national teams. Neither were there wildly waved national flags at the Brian Lara Stadium in March when the real T&T cricket team was beaten to a frazzle by an authentic Guyanese outfit.

So, this CPL thing really has nothing to do with “patriotism” or faux jingoistic pride. But, as I advised right here six years ago “if you use a national flag in the branding of any product, you can convert support into passion, affection into love, and a simple contest into a war.”

This came into pathetic view in 2018 when our T&T national flag was trampled on the ground at Providence Stadium by “patriotic” Guyanese fans on whose CPL team then resided the likes of Rayad Emrit and Jason Mohammed.

This year, local content ambitions conspired to omit even a solitary T&T presence on the GAW team and there has been accompanying social media dialogue. Yet can anyone say where Odean Smith gets his pepperpot? Or identify Azam Khan’s favourite fruit stand at Bourda Market?

Likewise, the lady with the JA flag on Saturday should have asked Amir Jangoo which pan jerk vendor around Kingston was his favourite or whether Chris Green preferred Papine Market over Coronation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the CPL has done more to excite interest among West Indians in the game of cricket than any other current platform. It is also a very well organised series.

Even so, this is about the game of cricket and not “West Indies Cricket” which is a virtual irrelevance in at least the four Caricom countries whose populations have zero interest in the game. The regional movement’s contribution of time and resources toward the sport – in its manifestation as “West Indies Cricket” - has probably (and quite justifiably) led to questions about the allocation of membership dues.

But anywhere national flags are being waved, it is difficult to apply rigour and reason. The fact is, (and I revisit my 2018 call to reason) “West Indies Cricket” (not the game of cricket) - as an expression of a coherent Caribbean ethos - has not existed in a very long time. There is no educational force-feeding or social engineering capable of reversing the process among the millennials.” It’s long over.

Indeed, imprisoned swindler, Allen Stanford, was on to something long before anybody else when he launched his 20/20 tournament in 2006 – in that instance with real flags representing actual countries.

I have a good friend who is one of the greatest post-facto (seconds after the game has ended) supporters of sports teams. So, today it’s St Lucia Kings, but he can easily pivot to whoever beats them on any given day.

But even he is often quick to point out that a win for SLK is not necessarily a win for Saint Lucia since the CPL is not a contest to identify “the best national cricket team in the Caribbean.”

To claim otherwise would be almost as foolish as concluding that a country is the best in the world at something when the rest of the world is not considered part of the equation. The CPL does not determine the best country at cricket in the Caribbean. It is great fun and excellent skills are on display. Why can’t it just be that?

 

Suck teeth lite

Back in 2015, French schools banned what they called “le tchip”, or “teeth-sucking” in class, considering it to be highly rude, offensive, and disrespectful. At that time, the move drew attention to a practice described as being derived from African and Afro-Caribbean culture.

Though, together with “cut-eye”, “steupsing” (my preferred spelling and I am sticking with it) is common throughout our region and we shared the rap for it in France, we actually have West Africa to blame/credit for its genesis.

“Steupsing” is eloquently described in a 2002 academic paper by Esther Figueroa and Peter L. Patrick as the expressive output of a “velaric ingressive airstream involving closure at two points in the mouth: against the velum (using the back of the tongue), and farther forward.”

John and Angela Rickford (1999) described both “cut-eye” and “suck teeth” as “Africanisms” now common in the “New World.”

My mother, like so many other Caribbean parents, was capable of simultaneously delivering the two admonitions to great effect. Her version seemed to rely on gratuitously moist inner cheeks, pursed lips, and impressive lung capacity. She also had a particularly dangerous “cut-eye.”

During my recent assignment in Sierra Leone, I witnessed my mother’s deep version of the “steups” a few times, though it appeared more common to encounter the “suck teeth lite” version, given the hustle and bustle of life in Freetown.

I told my friend there, acclaimed businesswoman Hannah Rolanda Max-Macarthy, that in the Caribbean we call it everything from “suck teeth”, “kiss teeth” (Jamaica), to “steupsing”, “stupesing", and “choopsing” – an act intended to express disgust, disapproval, or mere annoyance, depending on intensity in delivery.

What do you call it there, Hannah? “Suck tit.” If you’ve heard Krio being spoken, you can see how “tit” (and not “teeth”) flows smoothly. But I am NOT going to use that expression in this town.

I also consulted with Nigerian colleague/social activist, Cynthia Mbamalu (find her on Instagram, you won’t regret it), and she was surprised that “steupsing”, intended to achieve the identical impacts as in her country, was so prevalent in the Caribbean.

“Sometimes, when my mom wants to let you know you just messed things up, she drags the steups...sometimes it feels like 10 seconds long, mixed with different rhythms,” she said.

I boasted that my own mother had been capable of changing keys and probably held the record for the longest “steups” since it was five of us and she was an equal opportunity steupser.

Cynthia’s Igbo people rather elaborately call it “ima osu” – clearly not as onomatopoeic as the Trini “steups”, and even “streups” (which captures the moist sound that strengthens the impact of a proper “steups”).

My theory is that to be effective, “steupsing” should result from air sucked through extravagantly pursed lips (baby kiss style) between tightly clenched front teeth and resonate from the flapping of relaxed inner cheeks and jaw teeth generated by that air.

Habitual experts can test the limits of natural teeth, implants, and dental fillings – such is the vacuum created by intense delivery.

There are recent examples of public steupsing by important people. The French would probably be impressed at the injection of a measure of gentility in the course of an obnoxious act. “What is the question?” “Gun” … quick front teeth steups and walk away. This is “suck teeth lite” if ever there were to be such a category.

I have actually heard “suck teeth lite” more than once in polite company. Cocktails at such and such business function: “This is how they want people to vote for them? Steups!”

Ordinary folk, unlikely to be recorded or publicly quoted, draw deeply from today’s warm atmosphere, do the duck lips, and ensure the fresh air is diverted to the corners of our mouths likely to yield the loudest, most moist sound. Hence “streups”.

But, oh no, “suck teeth lite” seems to intentionally convey unfamiliarity with the passion of a true “steups.”

We all do it, don’t we? Last week, after clearing out my bank account to pay the mechanic, the left front wheel of my car encountered a new pothole along Abercromby Street in St Joseph - now normalised as apparently permanent pothole territory.

True, I should not have been having a doubles while driving but I was hungry. When the metal twisting ‘bang’ came, the quick substitute to cussing (few people have ever heard me cuss) was a deep “streups” that helped lodge a semi-consumed channa near where oxygen is supposed to enter my lungs.

“It good for you,” you say. Cue the elusive Facebook “steups” emoji.

 

Death Announcements

Uncle Vin would lay the Trinidad Guardian down on the dining table, open the then broadsheet wide, and turn the pages slowly having read what seemed like every single word. There would be room for little else on that table. Eventually, he’d reach the Death Announcements and there would often be a polite scrum – Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Kello - to witness possibly familiar names or faces.

It was a process that demanded silence, broken only by “Did you see So and So died?” or “Isn’t that So and So’s father/mother/brother/sister?” I often kept a safe but listening distance.

Years later, at Radio 610, the newsroom compiled the Obituaries, so I ran but could not hide. I protested timidly at the imposition and met death there much more regularly than in our newscasts.

Then one day, in the Guardian, I saw a picture of someone I was sure I knew. It was him. Short guy who attended holiday camp and played some decent cricket. I wrote a poem about it. I kept looking, rather morbidly, for familiar names as the years passed.

It was possible at that time, I think, to measure growth and maturity through the attention paid to news of inevitable death. Today, so many of us scroll or turn to ‘that’ page as soon as we clear the news and op-eds.

With social media now appearing to hover over almost everywhere death can now find us, newspaper pages serve mainly to verify and to validate and to inscribe permanently what we have already found out.

It was this way I received four quick jabs to the head, neck, chest, and stomach over the past week, just days before the 28^th anniversary of my mother’s sudden and still unbelievable death on August 31, 1995. Back then, Elizabeth Solomon and I were working on a project when everything happened, and I remember her kindness and comfort.

Last Sunday I read three simple words from Elizabeth. Three words, as if to elude stern grammarian eyes. “Fair winds Daddy.” A sailor child to a sailor dad.

“Fair winds and following seas”, would probably have been how Denis would have preferred the sentence more completely flowed. For those kinds of reasons, whenever we spoke, I kept my sentences short and allowed him to do most of the talking - including the cussing. He never suffered fools lightly, and you did not want to cross combative paths with him.

He once wrote that while he was opposed to the death penalty, should anyone harm any of the children or grandchildren, he would hasten the perpetrator’s passing with bare hands.

I scrolled again on Sunday and saw that Denyse Plummer had also delivered her final note. No personal stories there, except the embedded memory of her remarkable journey as one of the most important musical voices of our time. Then too, the toilet paper she took and spun as artful yarn around our hearts.

And Grenfell Kissoon, focused and committed. When he smiled there appeared childlike mischief, but for the most part there was a stony steadfastness the world of media typically demands. In his case, post 1990, there was a persistent memory of survival. Current testimonies confirm an important role in local media in all its corporate, professional, and inter-personal manifestations.

Roydon Salick’s ‘Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony’ was also only recently launched by Ian Randle Publishers.

Our other giant, Prof. Kenneth Ramchand, wrote of the publication: “(it) understands well enough the combined force of the fictions and the social, cultural, and historical works in which Anthony builds a unique history of Trinidadian cultures and historic moments. It invites new readers to take a serious look at Michael Anthony as an educator who makes it exciting to find out who we are.”

To some of the rest of us who met him and benefitted from Michael Anthony’s wisdom, generosity and charm, Ramchand’s reflections on the book (and since then), are difficult to match in eloquence and emotional impact.

Back in the 70s at QRC, Derrick Poon Young once practised his martial arts on me by delivering four quickfire punches to head, neck, chest, and stomach. The blows hurt rather badly. Over the last few days, both the QRC experience and Uncle Vin have come to mind.  

 

The Artificial Intelligence question

It may well be there are teams of expert public servants quietly locked away at ministry engine rooms, and activists associated with political organisations contemplating issues of technological change and its impacts on national development.

For, it is evident that none of it is currently being captured in the public dialogue of our politicians of all persuasions, even when scrupulously guided on public policy by senior civil servants, paid advisors, and otherwise smart people.

Neither is there proof, through action, that basic entry into the digital realities of the modern world is being embraced as an unavoidable step in the development process.

And, why not the platforms accorded local government contestants, to cite one example? What else do political organisations do to display relevance to increasingly challenging global circumstances?

Yes, this is me; yet again lamenting the painful lack of progress on basic digitalisation of public transactions, and even more than that, tracking the most recent developments associated with the emergence of Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a feature of current realities.

So, this is much more than digital ED cards for international travel, or online payment portals, or digitised official documentation and processes for procuring them. There are smaller regional neighbours who have detected positive implications regarding the cost of such transactions.

For expert instruction, there are journalists such as Mark Lyndersay who scan the minutiae of technological possibilities for evidence of public understanding on such matters. He is likely to agree with me that our shortcomings extend as much to private entrepreneurial limitations as they do with respect to undeniable official, public sector resistance to change.

On Monday, I received a report released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) analysing the “potential exposure of occupations and tasks to Generative AI.” I wondered then, what was the likely contribution of the social partners in the sphere of labour rights in T&T to this discussion. What are their views, if any?

Could it be that the PSA or OWTU or TTALPA had provided informed comment arising out of their understanding of the impact of this emerging platform on jobs and employment possibilities? Perhaps they have deployed member financial contributions to closely examine what becomes of occupations and tasks in the public service, the energy sector, and in aviation?

Are there folks at the Ministry of Labour currently engaged in reconciling ILO observations regarding the “exposure” of clerical workers in all sectors to adjustments in job quality and quantity?

How is the Ministry of Digital Transformation interpreting the anticipated calibrations throughout all sectors of the public sector?

Don’t get me wrong, operating in the Caribbean regional space entitles me to record similar observations on a wider scale – among them being the fact that public service resistance and private sector lethargy are strong features of the move to embrace digitalisation in almost all its aspects, and there is virtually nothing happening when it comes to anticipating Generative AI impacts.

It is not that we are all ignoring the signs. The more developed sectors of the regional media industry, for instance, are already (slowly) stepping into the frame.

At the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC), whenever AI enters the discourse, there have been found to be quite enlightened reflections on opportunities and challenges. Not enough, yet though. Legacy media are already among the most affected, if only due to the pervasive impacts of social media.

Back to the ILO study, there is acknowledgment of wide areas of variability, but great value in the way it explores general principles required to head-off net negative effects.

For one, governments and their social partners such as unions, business chambers, and employers’ organisations need to jointly and proactively design “policies that support orderly, fair, and consultative transitions, rather than dealing with change in a reactive manner.”

“Moreover,” the report says, “the likely ramifications on job quality might be of greater consequence than the quantitative impacts, both with respect to the new jobs created because of the technology, but also the potential effects on work intensity and autonomy when the technology is integrated into the workplace.”

Last Monday, the international NGO, Digital Communication Network (DCN) Global, also hosted an online session on Information as a Public Good, and questions about governance and the maintenance of democratic conditions kept coming up as potential subjects and objects of technological change.

How can our policymakers (and people with an expressed interest in our future as a country) not be concerned about these things, even as a function of the way our social institutions, including political parties and sectional representatives, operate? There is sad evidence they are not.

National issue – local solution

While conducting a quick scan of proceedings in my area last Monday, I noted the ease with which tardy electors were on public walkways negotiating what appears to be a growing population of seemingly homeless people in my general space incorporating St Joseph, Curepe, and Tunapuna.

True, on election day, these people appeared as scarce as midday voters and open bars. Maybe it is, as some suspect, that “they living somewhere” and roam as mendicants solely in the dark seeking unsecured bins and familiar philanthropists who won’t throw things at them or chase them away.

But, Monday evening, after they had survived weeks of loudspeakers, canvassing teams, and frenetic politicking, did any of them find time or opportunity to look on quietly in the opportunistic hope that the solemn task would eventually yield rewards?

You couldn’t bet on any animated huddle around a television set or radio – except perhaps those who “live somewhere” and leave with clean shirts at night. I don’t know.

It however would not have been irrational for them to have been absent. For, if they listened to the loudspeakers, they would not have heard much about themselves, if at all; not even as a national challenge requiring localised, community solutions.

Though official focus appears preoccupied with the poor condition of Port of Spain, it’s not absolutely different in numerous other communities throughout the country. Maybe in numbers, but not in essential nature.

In our neck of the woods, in the east, there are now familiar faces (and a growing number of new ones) with numerous heart-breaking real and fictitious stories for which food, drinks, and/or money provide solutions.

The more fortunate meanwhile have the option of crossing the street, walking around, pretending not to hear, or digging deep and hoping they forget you the next time you pass. “Things not easy these days, boy.”

There was one guy I remember from my teenage years. He went to secondary school, played some decent softball cricket, a little football, and smoked weed with the rest of us.

He disappeared for years, then re-emerged about five years ago as a Curepe Junction regular. Conversations often turned quickly to money or food.

Last week, I asked the oysterman and learned that this old friend had died less than a year ago.

I remember back in 1987 with the advent of a new political administration, there was the bold pronouncement by the humanitarian-minded that “vagrancy” would end sooner rather than later. Like the “cleanup” that occurred that January. That it was simply a matter of “political will” to get it done.

At that time, and perhaps not for the very first time, there was a well-publicised effort to address situations such as my late friend’s, as outcomes of underlying social, economic, and medical conditions. I must have written thousands of words of news copy explaining what had been considered 36 years ago. It all seemed to make sense.

However, it appeared to me then, as it does now, that national politicians should concede greater space to community wisdom on such matters, and kindly step aside. Otherwise, what we are left with are resolute soundbites, headlines, and convenient shibboleths.

There is evidence that people who have been employing science and not politics to dissect the growing incidence of homelessness/mendicancy here have a grip not only on the underlying conditions, but some of what is necessary to humanely address the challenge.

Young psychologist, Sule Joseph, broke things down rather competently in a recent newspaper interview. He cited the multifaceted nature of homelessness and the psychological underpinnings of some elements of the phenomenon.

As has been explained before, and impressively restated by Joseph, there are issues that have much to do with the rest of us at stake. This is no mere outcome of “laziness” or wilful protest against the status quo – though there are those, according to Joseph, who decide to opt out of the rat race. Indeed, some have been pushed out.

Back in 1987, it had been explained that while homelessness was sometimes the outcome of financial collapse and/or familial discord, there were more often than not instances where mental illness and (not unrelated) substance abuse had been causative factors.

Amateurs such as the politicians who have proposed solutions including coercive exile to outlying islands, prison, and high-power hoses, typically remain silent on such matters during election campaigns.

Last Monday was no exception. An opportunity was lost to explain how local organisation and action can, indeed, resolve an important matter of national concern. What were the issues that sidelined it?

 

The fading frontline applause

At 10 a.m. on April 9, 2020, many of us stood and applauded in solidarity with “frontline” workers engaged in beating back an advancing COVID-19 threat.

I am using the word “many” and not “most” because I was aware then of several influential factors - ranging from outright denial to the assertion that all of this was needless panic and “overkill” – all serving to temper enthusiasm for the symbolic exercise.

Self-declared virologists, public health experts, and sundry charlatans were aggressively chiming in to challenge the views of most of the world’s top medical scientists including our fine professionals right here.

Later that year, as politics became increasingly aligned with direct challenges to pandemic measures, there was the outrageous suggestion that all of this had been “manufactured fear”.

So, there we were, in April 2020, standing near the fence so that we could hear the sounds of the children next door as we applauded and cheered. We knew and understood that many others were not following suit, so there was a measure of hovering sadness.

Now, let me say from now, that I consider none of the detractors to have behaved as they did because they are outright evil folks with no regard for the lives of others.

But I felt strongly that the people who were out there facing an uncertain, possibly deadly risk – for there was much that remained unknown to everyone – were exhibiting heroic features that needed to be recognised and applauded.

Close to 40 months and over 4,300 lives later, the applause has largely faded. The last recorded COVID-19 deaths occurred in May. The “death with” and “death from” Google and Chat GPT experts, along with the “they would have died anyway” crowds can carry on with their callous nonsense even as families continue to grieve.

Today, not only has the cheering ended, but we have resumed our merry ways with renowned indifference to the state of affairs when it comes to our “heroes” of April 2020.

Against the backdrop of the current agitation of the Registered Nurses Association, today’s attention turns exclusively to these people in our public health system who earned our applause at a rather low point in our national life.

I have listened carefully to Association President, Idi Stuart, and spoke directly with him on Monday in an attempt to get to the bottom of his organisation’s grouses that have generated a largely deficient official response.

For one, I do not know where the impression was given that more money (as important as it is) is at the centre of the points of current contention. It seems to me that the main issues, validated by successive reports on the subject of public health care, revolve around things such as maintenance of key assets (including ambulances and other equipment), and the question of patient-to-staff ratios.

The Seemungal Committee Report, which focused largely on patient care at the height of the pandemic one year ago, and therefore reflected a worst-case scenario, identified some key flashpoints reflected in successive studies and inquiries under non-emergency circumstances.

We can also reference the 1994 Health Sector Reform Report and ensuing decentralisation legislation, and the Gladys Gafoor enquiry of 2010.

There was also the Winston Welch Report of 2017 which focused on the dynamics of private medical practice within the context of a socialised public health system – an inarguably, vastly superior approach to equitable access to the benefits of medical science.

Even in examining this, the 2017 report cited the challenges of resources, including personnel.

Almost all of the concerns between 1994 and 2022 are currently captured in the advocacy of the Nurses Association. Some of these include patient-to-staff ratios at the Regional Health Authorities, chronic issues associated with the reliability of pharmaceutical and other supplies, together with infrastructural shortcomings.

If anybody should be writing to other stakeholders to discuss these matters, it should be the Ministry of Health, acting in concert with the RHAs. It is unfortunate that public advocacy on this should so routinely find people with placards chanting slogans alongside strange friends in the streets.

Again, nobody is questioning anyone’s good intentions here. It is just that there are undeniable needs in a singularly important area of national life that require attention.

It should not be that in a sector as important as this - from the Gaspar Grande Report of 1978 to Gafoor, Welch, Seemungal and the Nurses Association’s placards of 2023, all spanning numerous political administrations and decades – there should be a regurgitation of identical issues.

Why is the frontline applause fading?

Our migrant footnote

‘Tis not the season for too much good sense or rigorous vigilance to prevail. For, elections here tend to be the stuff of comedic farce and the absurd. Such was the counsel of those older and wiser than I following the last column when I urged consideration of the true value of municipal governance in the midst of campaigning for local government elections.

So, when I received the latest release from the Organisation of American States (OAS) regarding a June 23 Declaration for the Protection and Integration of Migrant and Refugee Children in the Americas, I knew I had to pay close attention to it, since few others currently commanding even the smallest share of public space would be inclined to so do.

Bear in mind, and to its credit, our Ministry of Foreign and Caricom Affairs is now among the more prolific producers of timely press dispatches from the government system.

This has not always been the case. As a close observer in this particular area of national concern, I can tell you that there were times when opportunities to remain silent were, as matters of policy and practice, never shunned.

The current period is thus not marked by the kind of opacity that became the norm not very long ago. During those bleak days, this told many of us that an official environment existed in which foreign policy is not deemed as important to maintaining a high level of political preference.

I therefore checked to see whether the June Declaration had at any time occupied space at the public information mill over at foreign affairs. For, the main political combatants and their shadowy surrogates would have been hopeless, futile sources – however intriguing the Declaration under current circumstances.

These were people, you see, who had led the “close de borders” crew and had not winced at the thought of kicking the bows back into dark, rough ocean waters with women and small children on board.

Then belatedly to conclude that these were people, after all, including children who need to be in school. Girls who need to be respected. Little people who need to be meaningfully integrated into society so they can contribute to national life.

Some of this makes me recall the time the late prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, James Mitchell, snapped when I questioned the absence of foreign policy as a manifesto objective during the course of an election (which he lost): “Foreign policy never won anyone an election,” he said.

As a consequence, I suppose, what I consider to have been an interesting intervention by this country at the 53rd Regular Session of the OAS, had eluded even minister Browne’s media engine room.

Read the declaration and you would note three important country provisos to declared hemispheric obligations regarding the rights of migrant children.

The US had technical issues with a provision related to “the right to identity” and the Dominican Republic indicated that it is not a signatory to agreements mentioned in the declaration.

The most significant for us, is T&T’s “footnote” which qualified T&T’s commitment only to the extent that the rights in question are “recognised in international agreements to which we are signatories and in accordance with our national legislation.”

In other words, we plan to comply only if there is a coercive obligation. UWI experts, do I have that right?

Then, just days later on July 4, Justice Frank Seepersad ruled, in summary, that the 1951 Refugee Convention does not apply in our instance due to the absence of relevant domestic legislation.

What does all of this mean in the current context? For one, bipartisan parliamentary action can ensure that July 4 and June 23 do not collide to cause harm to the most vulnerable in our midst – children.

School places alone do not meet the minimum standards set by the June 23 declaration. I have witnessed the unseemly, obscene scramble for credit on this question.

It is time that signatures on international conventions and declarations and handshaking photo-ops give way to more detailed explanations of what these things really mean.

Had this been the case, electorates would have more competently judged our country’s performance as a regional, hemispheric, and global partner.

For instance, had anyone been paying attention, there would have been sharp repudiation of hypocrisy on questions related to the Caribbean Court of Justice, the nature of the Caricom Single Market, and the various options under conditions of open regionalism.

Venezuela and Haiti would not have come as tragic surprises, and the absence of law would not have been an excuse for breaking high-profile, photographed, and press released promises. These things need to begin delivering political damage.