I see things

So, most of us have made it to 2024. Happy New Year! Last week I threatened to convert the Caribbean public affairs focus of this column into a space to which you turned for advice on love, jobs, the weather, pet care, the best curry mango, and fireworks.

We had had thick Sahara Dust last week, you see, and the neighbourhood animals were psyching themselves up for the usual assault from humans who consider loud noises capable of delivering some form of sadistic/masochistic happiness.

I spoke then of this ghostly, floating, human form I took for a late friend and colleague and literary gem who did not make the crossing beyond 311223. BC routinely imitated former Miami Herald columnist Robert Steinbeck’s annual predictions column.

The great bald one had even included some amazingly accurate predictions of his own (with some moderate adjustments including the names of people, places, and times for greater accuracy). For example, he would predict things like: Today, a man in north Trinidad will enter a pharmacy before noon with a prescription to address a lingering hangover from Sunday night’s revelry.

Then, when recording such a remarkably accurate prediction, he would insert the name of a friend he had taken to the pharmacy. Sometimes, he would also count on people forgetting what he had predicted and post-facto report on the success of what he recalled was a wild guess.

All fun and games until you notice that the last Play Whe mark of 2023 was “spider” (33). I would have lost at least $5 on that draw, since I only play “12” whenever I remember that I can get rich off these games of chance.

By the way, my number did not play on Boxing Day (even though it signifies “king” and there is no Play Whe on a Sunday or “holy” day because gambling is a sin unless the government says otherwise). Late prime minister Patrick Manning once announced to collective horror that he planned on outlawing all forms of gambling. Three years later, his party spectacularly lost a prematurely declared election. Just saying …

But, back to “spider.”

If you did physics at school you must know that either real or imagined spiders (including those that find your sleeping face in the night) can mean both good and bad things. Trinis typically believe that if you see a spider in your house (a brown one … not a pink or blue one) it means that you will win the Lotto and have enough money to light up the entire country in fireworks next festive event.

In some cultures, though, spiders bring only poor luck, especially if they rest on your face at night. This basically ensures that you’re not going to make it to the Lotto ticket booth. The South-East Asians, and others, minimise such a risk by roasting and serving them lightly salted and peppery at street markets. Tip: Avoid roasted tarantula butt at all costs.

So, “spider” played on 301223, and this means that we can expect a mix of good and bad. I hope you took pictures of the fruit punch bowl, because all of it would have been right there before your very eyes. As a longstanding teetotaller (nope not even rummy black cake), I keep my eyes wide open when confronted with a fruit punch bowl. I am aware that genuine psychics also use cards left hanging around after games of All Fours – by looking at the Jack cross-eyed and for long enough. Everything appears magically.

Last year, for instance, I predicted that a stubborn pothole along Abercromby Street in St Joseph some of us had given a name because of our intimate familiarity with it (I called it “Rohan”) would have been patched with a loose amalgam of oil sand and pitch and fought back with all its might to return within weeks to claim more rims and front ends.

For 2024 – because I looked cross-eyed into a rain puddle that had accumulated in a pothole along Gordon Street in St Augustine – I saw water leaks undermining roadways and WASA-like interventions that temporarily stem the waterflows but leave undercarriage crushing humps and sharp tyre-busting gravel.

I also saw traffic jams and confusion on main roads and highways. A puddle in Arima told me this. Then, elections. I saw elections coming in 2024 when the sun reflected off a poster on a San Fernando rumshop wall at an angle that made me squint and see shadowy things.

In fact, Bunglee Bungler comes up against Thomas Crook for the presidency of the Hapless Suckers Sports and Cultural Club. On 311224, I will tell you who I saw as the winner. I promise.

The advice columnist

 

Last Sunday, I was reading the newspapers (I get hard copies on weekends because I am old-fashioned and they’re seriously handy with the mosquitoes) in my patio. My cat, Oreo, was fighting me for space on my footrest (I keep my feet up while reading the newspapers in case I see a deal I missed at the supermarket and feel like kicking myself), when I started feeling the effects of the weatherman’s Red Sahara Dust Alert.

Oreo, who was born black and white, and is a girl with a boy’s name (I explain to people that having been spayed, she/it can be called “Michael” if anyone wanted to) started looking grey and brown. I blinked and blinked, but there she/it was – grey and brown Oreo - nonchalantly licking her/its nether parts while I tried to blink away emerging illusions.

But the dust won’t go away. Then I saw before me a rising mist above the brown and purple cherry tree, and an emerging figure – short, baldheaded, earrings, and with calves the size of pregnant cows. “BC dat is you?” I asked. No response. Only this ghostly figure hovering and backdropped by a bunch of struggling dou doux mangoes.

I had just read one of the most absurd newspaper columns about Xmas and had refreshed my Blue Mountain coffee. I gulped it all in one go. Then I heard this voice: “You! Yes, you … not the cat!”

“Me?” I heard steupsing. “Yes, you.”

Now, coffee can be a rather powerful drug. Following a talk by “ministry of education officials” on the evils of illicit drugs at QRC 50 years ago, some of us dried ti-marie bush for days before cutting, wrapping, and smoking it. But there was this one guy who tried sniffing the fumes from roasted coffee beans. He ended up with one GCE pass. One. Think about that.

But this was not the coffee. I actually heard a raspy voice from above the cherry tree. Oreo paid no attention - one leg in the air (as if she didn’t care) and her/its tongue diligently committing the grossly unspeakable.

“You,” went the voice, “like too much bacchanal! Effective immediately, your column shall be used to help people address everyday needs.”

“But Master (I couldn’t think of another title … though “Bro” might have worked), aren’t there important matters of wider public concern to be addressed? Ethnic cleansing? The murder of babies and children? Geo-political intrigue? Ineffective governance? Climate change? Religious hypocrisy?”

“Shut up!” Oreo paused mid lick. I heard the chicken go “cluck cluck” before running away (I have a chicken, it appeared out of nowhere a few months ago with a youngster who has since mysteriously gone missing).

“Effective immediately, an advice column shall be published every week in this space.”

“But, but.”

“Shut up!”

“For instance, here’s someone who needs real help. There’s this guy who thinks that a ban on using fireworks and busting bamboo in his neighbourhood at this time of year is in violation of his human rights. Advise him!”

Oh, that’s easy. “Dynamite. Inside the guy’s house. Clear out the women and children first. Then wait for the blast. Let the neighbourhood kids with their puny sparklers take that!”

“Umm. I don’t think so. Let’s try another one. A thief has just cleared out a family’s fridge (ham, turkey, pastelles gone!) and run away … belching and laughing loudly. They suspect he is hiding in their annoying neighbours’ house. These people play loud music late at night and the sickening smell of cooking oil hangs in the air for days.”

“Simple. Dynamite. Two sticks. That should smoke him out!”

“But what about the neighbours?”

“Kill two birds with one stone. It’s probably not their property anyway. Get rid of the thief and the unwanted neighbours in one go. I like this. Give me another problem to solve.”

“Wes, I don’t think this is working out. Maybe we should stick to less complicated matters. Love, perhaps?”

“Yeah. The fireworks of love. What a blast. I can do this. When do I start? Next week?”

“I have an idea. Why don’t you kick off the New Year next week with something on why Caricom remains the only viable regional solution to the full range of developmental challenges in the region?”

“But I thought you said …”

“Hush, my friend. Hush.” At that stage, the dust cloud rose to meet the gloomy clouds. Oreo wanted to use the litter box. I got up and reached for a half-eaten pastelle and a fresh cup of coffee.

Three little boys on the ocean

* First published in the T&T Guardian on December 2, 2020 and should be followed by a read of this Man Overboard!

There are some subjects best left to the poets and dramatists and musicians and visual artists whose deft touch can straddle emotion and the rigours of reason at the stroke of a single moment or line. Issues well out of the reach of the disciplines of law, politics and journalism. Equations that defy the arithmetic of known logic and the dicta of organised religion.

Since the events of last week, I have therefore been turning to Victor Edwards’ Takdir on the question of migrant journeys. To Wayne Brown on matters of the troubled ocean. And to Pablo Neruda on love and the sea.

To Victor I present the makings of a script that echoes Gurusammi’s fateful voyage. To Wayne, a child of the sea. To Pablo, the troubled strait that took its name from a genocidal European explorer.

For Victor I offer as opening scene three little boys set sail on the ocean – Aylan (3), Felipe (8) and let’s call the other one Hugo or Pablito.

Pablito, the landlubbing seafarer. We don’t know his age, but he wore a Spiderman t-shirt in the newspaper. We couldn’t see his face because he kept staring at the tears that reached the wet ground when he landed.

Sternward, in the growing and increasingly dark distance, can be seen the ruinous flames of a collective death – Joshua’s fabled Hazor, to those who this season sing of Baby Jesus and claim to know why.

To the bow, the tentative promise of life. Aylan’s parents raised $5,860 for the trip. His mother wears a life vest later found to be “ineffective.” She dreams not of shopping malls and romantic rendezvous with strangers speaking strange languages but yearns for peace and safety.

Little Aylan wears a red t-shirt and dark blue shorts. New suede shoes for the journey to a new life. His mother sings him lullabies through the stormy night.

Felipe has not stopped coughing since they left the soggy, wooded makeshift port. He has had the flu. He’d earlier been separated from his parents for “processing” and now he is running a high fever and shivers each time the rain comes down on the open vessel.

Then there’s Hugo. He’s hard to miss as the boat sways wildly in the wind and rain and Mr Spiderman casts imaginary webs to tame the wild ocean.

You put them all on an open pirogue under an angry sky, at which point all that went before and all that happens after pale into insignificance as counterbalances on perspective. Three little boys on a boat in the ocean.

You wonder if in freezing the moment and stripping it of context you reach the core, the raw elements of what adults describe as “rights.” At the very moment that the giant wave arrives there is little behind both horizons, since though there is a relativism attached to many rights, there is an absolutism that flows from all – the “fundamental” cast in law versus the universality and indivisibility of human rights.

The experts make the distinction far less clearly than the water colourist at her palette. Suddenly, “how dem reach there?” and “who put dem there?” become as irrelevant as the burning shore to the west and the three cloudy peaks to the east.

There is no “other take”. No “perspective” apart from the fact of three little boys on a boat on the ocean. Nicolás, in thick rubber boats had kicked the boat from its moorings and turned away while muttering insults at people who weren’t there.

On the other shore, faceless, leaderless “authorities”, regular folks, and friends of the sea shouting cusswords and waiting with steel-tips to kick the vessel back. No more room at the inn. No more space for any boarders. “Send dem back. Send dem back” – as elections slogan. As potent as the command to a firing-squad. As murderous as official confusion and cluelessness.

Anna Levi writes: “Pablito like an ornament in his birth blanket/Asleep with his angels/Fallen overboard/Tumbling with the tides/A moment of silence.”

Sometimes, you turn to poetry and music and art to explain and to help turn away from depravity. Sometimes, you think of three little boys on the ocean. And, suddenly, they are gone and there is nothing and no one else in the world.

Footnote: In memory of Aylan Kurdi of Syria and Felipe Gómez Alonzo of Guatemala. Thinking of “Pablito” of Venezuela.

Man overboard!

Media colleague and friend, George Leacock, beat me to it in a social media post on Sunday, by quoting GML Tobago Correspondent Elizabeth Gonzales’ report on Friday’s dramatic ocean rescue of a man off the northwestern tip of Trinidad in choppy, open waters.

Passengers on board the Buccoo Reef inter-island vessel had spotted a lone swimmer who was waving desperately out at sea as he tread water and fought for his life. The ferry crew responded quickly enough to launch a lifeboat and to execute a dramatic rescue – the first ever under such circumstances, according to NIDCO.

This was when the story got even more interesting, prompting George to quote just one sentence from Elizabeth’s dispatch: “While some passengers were happy to help,” the reporter wrote, “others were irritated over the extended time the voyage to Tobago took.”

The swimmer was one of three people eventually saved after a boat left T&T, bound for Venezuela in darkness, but overturning in rough waters. I do not suppose routine maritime regulations were stringently observed or that immigration and customs authorities played a role in ensuring other lawful guidelines were observed.

And, for a change some might contend, with human cargo on board, the bow was conspicuously due west and, from the stern, could have been seen the north coast shore of Las Cuevas. How bothersome! They are both coming and going!

It could have been much like a similar journey three years ago when, forcibly turned back at sea for Venezuela by “the authorities,” a missing vessel was purported to have taken two dozen people to their death. This prompted sombre reflections on this very page entitled: Three Little Boys.

I metaphorically enjoined the fates of three little boys from three separate migrant tragedies - Aylan Kurdi of Syria, Felipe Gómez Alonzo of Guatemala and a boy called “Pablito” of Venezuela on whom writer, Anna Levi, reflected:

“Pablito like an ornament in his birth blanket/Asleep with his angels/Fallen overboard/Tumbling with the tides.”

I had at the time lamented the role of the “turn them back” and “close de borders” (coming and going?) crew – willfully ignorant of non-refoulement obligations under international law - who have, since then, never been able to publicly and regretfully reflect on a tragedy that saw some people branding authorities, politicians, and regular folks this side of the border near savages.

“Turn them back” (refoulement) had by then become the stuff of political slogan and even official doctrine – more so as a fallback position had “close de borders” failed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, none of this is meant to advocate disorder or unlawful behaviour. I am taking aim at the psycho-social pre-disposition that considers a rescue at sea an annoyance – a needless disruption. Experts on communal mental illness and sick societies probably have a name for this.

This can also be fertile metaphor for a state of collective being – the lost and drifting encountering the reluctant and uncommitted, themselves afloat but hopelessly lost.

All of this, even as we ourselves flounder in a vast global ocean of cognitive challenges. Only Monday, International Migration Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres put a brave and healthy spin on this: “If managed well, mobility can be a cornerstone of sustainable development, prosperity and progress.”

“If managed well” – much easier said than done. We also don’t appear to be keeping an eye on this particular requirement of the migration challenge – even when it comes to what could well have been an attempt at voluntary repatriation … perhaps.

It is also true that recent experiences have turned our attention more inward than it is currently devoted to exogenous challenges, however urgent. The discomfort is evident. Witness the partisan confusion over Guyana/Venezuela when viewed as fuel for sectional posturing.

On stark display has been the absence of sound, independent countervailing values at a time when national decisiveness on the basis of rational discourse is required. While the official response has been consistent and clear, even if at times incorrect or contestable, nothing much has emerged that appears to be from vantage points untouched by simplistic partisan gamesmanship.

It seems so many times that we are all overboard and grasping at the turbulent tide. The lifeboats and vests we dispense for our own benefit and survival.

Rights as habits of human conduct

At the current rate, there will come a time when the people who require the greatest protection on grounds of the universality of human rights will begin dismissively forging alternative pathways to justice, peace, freedom, and equality.

In my view, generally muted national, regional, and global observance of Human Rights Day last Sunday signalled a state of cognitive dissonance induced by cynically routinised breaches in the letter and spirit of enshrined rights of all varieties.

I would like to think that when the world assembled in 1948 to declare the universal, inalienable nature of human rights and to prescribe their tangible expression it was expected that the ravages of global conflict at that time would have provided an impetus that was urgent and seen to be indispensable.

Alongside the civil and political rights eventually came a vast suite of economic, social, and cultural rights. National constitutions and laws were codifying them. Systems of justice were being crafted to interpret them. Civil society was inculcating rights as foundational values for advocacy and change. More than 60 international human instruments have been created and adopted.

Our leaders were all over the planet signing pieces of paper and delivering speeches and press releases. We were seeing some as exemplars and others as reckless violators and pariahs. There was the institutional entrenching of values deemed to be important pillars of true development –intangibles that belong as much to statute as to stature and status. 

Yet, four days ago, some of the loudest state voices on such imperatives were found, when thin outer coatings were stripped, to be actively presiding over violations of the rights of children, military non-combatants, the poor, the displaced, the different, and the weak.

This is no esoteric parable. Genocide, invasions, threats to territorial integrity, systemic discrimination, state-sanctioned murder and violence – all there in real time before all our eyes.

Despite this, our Caribbean region, whose peoples have been collectively victimised through historical antecedent by the issues frontally addressed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been slow to consider recognition of human rights as being the stuff of official instinct and habit.

Witness active resistance to the notion of all rights as an entitlement of all people. Our countries neither officially nor informally recognise such a truism.

Had the contrary been the case, current attitudes toward the LGBT community, migrants, reproductive rights, freedom of expression, and the rights of the vulnerable among us would have been settled matters of public policy and life.

It would have also helped us come to terms, far less painfully, with current regional and global developments that require an understanding of territorial integrity especially as it relates to the rights of inhabitants, deadly aggression at times of illicit collective punishment, discrimination on account of race and ethnicity, and the more stringent application of civil and political rights as preconditions to the achievement of economic, social, and cultural rights.

We could have told there would have been this difficulty with countenancing such difficult terrain. There is a sprinkling of special interest activism but too few national umbrella organisations in our region (I think our Bar associations should lead this, but they don’t) to capture these obligations within the context of developmental objectives.

The Sustainable Development Goals provided important pathways to understanding the connections, but our countries have not yet taken the hint. For example (and I raise this yet again), SDG 16 speaks to the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies” for sustainable development through “access to justice for all”.

A key target (16.10) promotes public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms. The Global Forum for Media Development, of which I am a part, put up a stout fight to have this target expressed. Caribbean countries (not T&T so far) have also signed on to the Escazú Agreement on access to information and public participation in environmental matters.

I am unaware of a single political organisation in T&T that put Sunday aside to remind their devotees about these things. Additionally, how many sermons in holy places addressed them?

It seems to be hardly a necessary annoyance at this time to let people know that there are terrible things in the world today that could have been so much different had people resolved to convert rights into durable habits of human conduct.

Edward Baugh speaks on Passages

 

LAUNCH OF WESLEY GIBBINGS’ PASSAGES

(The Observer Board Room, 31 May 2019)

 

Prof. Edward Baugh reviews 'Passages'

The title of the book is Passages.  Since that isn’t the title of a particular poem in the collection, we try to guess where it is taking us, for the word may have various meanings.  As we read, we find that most of the poems deal, in different ways, with comings and goings, sometimes between one person and another, grappling with the idea that these relationships are never fixed or conclusive.  The situation is one of moving towards, of passing, of passing by, of moving away, of inconclusiveness, of ending, of endlessness.

 

So, in “Shadows,” “the shadows born one day ago / are hunting lights, / the forms that put them there / long gone / behind a spaceless sky.”  In “That Time Has Come,” the persona tells us that the “time has come,” presumably to arrange for departure:  “We have waited long enough / The tide has turned / The ship is in.”  He will put his house in order, rearranging the books of poetry on his bookshelves.  “The time has truly come / For old diaries with blank, unturned pages / City streets with tired feet / To flee the frame.”  In “In the End,” “the streets are bare / we greet each other / with knowing, lonely / eyes // And we say goodbye.  Goodbye. / Goodbye.”  The poems make us think; they tease thought.

 

Here is “The House:”

 

              It was a house

              Of many absences

 

              Dust settled on her bed

 

              Outside, the green of mountains blue

              Inside, the shadowy dim of things we knew

 

              I met you here

 

              This empty house

 

              Echoes spliced between silence and quiet

              Nothing etched with nothingness

 

The first poem in the book is titled simply “The Poem,” and it may be read as a prelude, speaking to and for each poem, prefiguring the mind-frame and drift of the collection.  The poem, in its way a love poem, shies away from making any great claim for itself, from conclusiveness, from elation.  In the process, it advances the necessity of moving on, of leaving, of being left:   “I would prefer that you hold / the page to your heart / upside down / and read it once / and put it away,” “and walk away, / slowly, as if on forbidden ground.”  “Just hold the damn poem / in your hand / and read word by word / and just throw it away / and leave it there.” The idea of passage, of passing is being engaged:   “How good it would be / if you read it aloud / so the words sail away / to never / return.”  The line break after “never” in “sail away / to never / return” prompts a double meaning.  The words will sail away, never to return, but also, the words will sail away to “never,” a place, a condition.

“Every Morning (for Mom)” is a plain-speaking, arresting elegy, which begins: “There was no justice / in her leaving / in the middle of the / Poui’s short hello”, and ends, “This morning / I wait for you again / I hope / You too wait for me”.

 

In “The Poem,” also, idea is realized in one or two arresting images.  We should “Swallow [the] poem like a pill. / Like the one that ends / a headache on a plane / or speeding minibus / or riverboat.”  Again: “Drink from it like sweet coconuts / in the island sun. / Then burp politely / and walk away […].”  “Exit” ends with “the sound of the ocean’s / Muffled drums / That fade away / In the dying light.”  In “Once it was,” “the insomniac terrier / In the neighbour’s yard / Howled as if the moon / Had landed there.”  In “The Shore of Dying Dreams,” “Near the empty conch shell / where the groping waves cannot reach, / there’s an old shoe. / Sole lost to uneven pavements […].”  Maybe the reader will wish for more such evocative, meaning-pointing imagery.  Conversely, one might feel that the easy, vaguely poetic “dream” could have been a bit more sparingly used.  Similarly, there might have been some pruning of the little rhetorical redundancies.

 

The scene-setting images of small island, beach, waves, sea, ocean locate the collection, and provide a frame and grounding for the dominant themes.  This frame and grounding, for universal ideas, is Caribbean.  In the middle of the collection we come to a few poems that are set in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean.  They shift focus from the personal and inter-personal, to the social, the public, the historical, the people, thereby widening the interest of the book.  “River Story” seems to be set in the Guyanese interior and to address ethnic interface in a manner that suggests the surrealism of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris.  In “Bartica Dreams” we are still in Guyana, in the town of Bartica, at the confluence of the Mazaruni, Cuyuni and Essequibo rivers, gateway to the interior and to the gold and diamond mining areas.  The poem is a response to the Bartica Massacre of 2008, when a gang of criminal gunmen entered the town by boat, murdered twelve citizens and wounded several others.

 

The terror of guns is also central to “Red House Fears” and “Of Haiti And Other Wars.”   The Red House is the popular name of the Parliament building in Port of Spain.  In July 1990 a group of insurgents stormed the building and took captive the Prime Minister and members of his Cabinet, holding them hostage there for six days until the uprising was quelled.  The insurgents killed seven persons, including Mervyn Teague, an employee of the Government Broadcasting Unit and colleague of our poet, who writes: “angry, bursting bullets and angry tears . Mervyn loved it here […].”  Again,

                            

angry, crying bullets, rage and fury –

                             have they died?

                             have we died and, rising

                             with the sound of trumpets,

                             are left with Paradise unfolding?

                             I think not.      

 

 

“Of Haiti And Other Wars” evokes the complex spirit of Haiti’s history of struggle, resistance, loss, oppression and deprivation.  It begins:

                             Dark soldier at attention near the sea

                             A tear, like sudden blood,

                             Down sweat and flesh and the teeth of strangers

                             Through bullets and barrels of loaded guns

 

As the book moves toward its close, there is an upswing in tone and point of view.  There is a clutch of love poems, mostly lyrically affirmative, poems such as “At Night’s End,” “Young Lady,” “Tall and Slim and Wonderful,” and “Love’s Revelations.”

I quote:

 

                             There you are, young lady.

                             March, indeed, brings laughter –

                             brings sunny, Maracas kinds of days;

                             glimmering, tumbling waves

                             on little, noisy islands.

                                                          (“Young Lady”)

Or:

 

                             Because at night’s end

                             When your eyes betray

                             Your dreams

                             And your tiny hands reach like

                             Butterflies for the sky

                             I see the sleep rise

                             With mine

                             Above the groans and strains

                             Of waking earth

                                                          (“At Night’s End”)

Or:       

 

                             Listen to me, lady.

                             He does indeed love you

                             in the way the bee finds the bursting flower

                             in the early dew.

                             And like that time

                             before the evening fell

                             like a ripened mango and, startled,

                             he held you close

                                                          (“This Morning”)     

 

The love poems transition into poems about ageing, looking back on the past, dying, departure:

 

                             On the sands of the seas

                             We stand seeing the sunset

                             Melt before our eyes

                             And cry good-bye

                             To our years

                             Of leaping for golden clouds

                                                          (“A Story”)

 

                             … we both now know

                             each day goes faster than the last

                             a clock ticking on the wall

                             like a leaking toilet

                             in the night

                                                          (“Because We Know”)

 

In “When We Die” the speaker, now ageing, recalls himself as

 

                             I who once walked in the hot, melting asphalt

                             Cooled only by crushed pomeracs and dried dog shit

                             And fumbled sno-cones

                             And the old man’s crumpled sweaty frame

                             Awake from drunken, midday sleep

 

But eventually, departure is release, a going forward and upward.  “Come See Me Fly” ends: “Let’s leave / This weary, dying place / Let’s fly away / Let’s live / Let’s just fly and live.”  To end is to ascend; “passages,” again.

 

 

Edward Baugh

 

 

When nothing changes

Seven days after going missing, young Tessa returned home on Sunday to the relief of an entire St Joseph community. A “mixed breed” black and brown dog, wearing a pink collar, her situation was the single most discussed issue on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group for a very long time – including ongoing discourses on crime.

Maybe it’s the algorithms or sheer coincidence, but I also cannot remember as many missing animal reports as were recorded since … you know when. One unfortunate character was arguing on social media that the noise and mayhem were an important part of religious observance. Don’t huff and puff, I’ve heard other denominations with the same talk.

In a community that experiences frequent encounters with non-domestic animals – birds, squirrels, parrots, manicous, iguanas and others, it could not have been roaming hunters alone responsible for their sudden absence for about a week.

In a few weeks from now, we are bracing for the same assaults – long established to be harmful to humans and our natural environment. Then, for yet another 12 months, leaders of politics, religion, business, together with numerous everyday citizens will be declaring: “leave dem nah”.

The fact is, not one single government has been prepared to do what is needed to address the problem – Noise Pollution Rules and Summary Offences Act notwithstanding. “Zero tolerance” thus remains among the more hollow official declarations.

Yes, I will be the sourpuss to keep at this. For, I do not subscribe to the preservation of any ancient or longstanding cultural or other practice that is provably harmful. We have already discussed this in instances of child marriage, corporal punishment, and vigilante justice, among others.

But where else is the dissent? Environmental groups, animal rights activists, and a few stragglers with access to public platforms say the same things at least three times a year. The typical response elevates such practices to approvable cultural practice and tradition.

Where are the politicians invoking regulation and enforcement? The business leaders urging moderation, even in pursuit of profits? Religious leaders preaching a duty of care? The police doing their duty? And community leaders helping people understand the potential for damage and injury.

True, it may well be that a referendum on continued breaches of law and civilized behaviour will fail on the basis of notions of cultural value. So, until this changes, every single year, on more than one occasion, we will hear the complaints of the ill and aged affected by the noise and smoke, and there will be the ritualistic posting of photos of lost pets spooked by the mayhem, and natural flora and fauna cynically disturbed and destroyed. Nothing will change.

Not long from now, mere weeks away, the posters identifying missing animals will go up again around our neighbourhoods, somebody will require more medication or attention for burns, maybe a house of two will be damaged or destroyed by fire, and the letters to the newspapers and radio talk shows calling for more considerate citizens will be in abundance.

Then we won’t have to wait too long for the assurance that something will be done about the situation. We know the drill. A Cabinet item, public consultations, “zero tolerance” etc etc.

Some of us have been around long enough to have heard all of this numerous times from politicians, police commissioners and everyone in-between.

Maybe this will earn mention at forthcoming “crime talks” of the various varieties currently on the table, once the main actors drop the political grandstanding.

At times like these, colleague journalists ought to be busy checking with the various magistrates’ courts on the vast amounts being transferred into government coffers as a result of fines derived from application of the law - $1,000 under Chapter 11:02 and $1,500 under Section 70 of the Summary Offences Act.

Everywhere, in full view of politicians of national and local status, the police, religious leaders, respectable business people, academics, professionals, and lesser mortals such as journalists we could have run informal tallies. In my area alone, the national coffers could have benefitted in the tens of thousands. Some people kept count – but more in order to calculate the cost of idiocy.

I can imagine the ensuing Cabinet discussions. The minister of social development congratulating the minister of national security, the prime minister congratulating the minister of finance.

We can at least dream on – provided we are given the opportunity to sleep of course.