It’s that time of the week again as I watch people begin their rolled marches to work in their vehicles, the beginnings of Monday morning traffic on the nearby highway. It’s a highway in Trinidad and Tobago, but in larger countries it might be simply a road, just as what we call a river here would be called a drain in Guyana.

The traffic, though, is real, as people grind their way toward dropping their children to school, getting to work and maybe even being productive there after the standard amount of time talking about how bad the traffic was this morning.

Somewhere in government, some idiot is probably trying to find a new way to decrease traffic while filling their pockets. The usual suspects will get contracts and kick money back, and there will be more roadways to have traffic on such that more people can talk about it in the morning.

Over the weekend I encountered an unnamed local politician’s question on why the local temperatures were so high, as if he had just awoken from a slumber. The question bothered me for a few reasons.

First, it was a question central to Trinidad and Tobago, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist – and I expect in his mind other places only exist to hold money outside of the purview of the local government. He may have even visited these places and treated them like Narnia, coming home to tell everyone of the wondrous and terrible things he saw. Maybe he could write a book. The fact that temperatures have been breaking records world-wide seemed to be something he was completely oblivious to.

Second, and probably even more importantly, as someone with all these connections to have his position, the fact that he didn’t know why temperatures were so high should bother people, but it doesn’t. People were helpfully commenting on his facebook post, trying to remedy his lack of knowledge.

These are the sort of people that are ‘leading’ society in Trinidad and Tobago, it seems, and perhaps why the solutions they present suffer their own lack of understanding of the problems.

Or maybe they’re just popular idiots. There seems to be a trend globally for electing popular idiots.