Caribbean

The Day’s Satire.

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A friend of mine shared a post on Facebook today that stated, “There’s something deeply ceremonial about the first sip of coffee. It’s like the opening act to the day’s drama.”

My comment, made during my first cup of coffee, was: I prefer to view it as satire. I’m just not sure what it’s satire of. That makes it funnier.

I do know what it’s satire of, I think. It’s satire of what one would believe would be sanity. The day went accordingly. First, a little bit of background.

The *Gasp* Background.

Globally there has been some changes in weather patterns. Some say it’s climate change, some deny that, but regardless of who says what everyone agrees that the weather is not really what we would like, which is why the English went out and conquered other countries to have tourism in: Terrible weather. This time, though, it’s on a planetary scale.

It’s so bad that some people accused of being smart by very loud cults of mediocre people have decided to invade Mars, a planet that actually has worse weather for humans than Earth. Rather than admit the mistake, the cults and all who would listen are encouraging people to leave the planet by making the weather here worse. It could be that European countries tried that, but sailing ships just didn’t pollute enough so they had to work extra hard. You know. Times were tougher to make other people as miserable as the weather in Europe made them, so they had to put in that extra effort.

Anyway, in the dual island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, not very far from the equator, anecdotal evidence jumps out at you and smacks you with anything available. It’s all anecdotal because there seems to be some trouble with handling information by the governments that have came, went, stayed, and sat. It’s not political, it’s just… well, I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty clear what it isn’t: working.

Because Trinidad and Tobago is bleeding edge when it comes to State Enterprises, handling Water and Sewage is handled by the Water and Sewage Authority, known by the acronym WASA. I suspect that they tried SAWA, but it may have been confused with the local pronunciation of San Juan and so they went with WASA.

This dry start to 2024 did not surprise anyone – except, apparently, WASA. They did know, of course1, and that article in the footnote is a short read and I must warn you: It isn’t satire, it isn’t fiction. It’s just sort of what you expect from a state run enterprise in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, to my point, it is satire of the way things should be done.

I know, I know, that’s anecdotal. Bear with me, I’ll just give you a rundown from Today.

Today.

Just before this, there was a light dusting of rain outside. The condensate was so surprised that it threw itself at the ground and mist. This is likely partly because of Sahara Dust, though I suspect other regions have offered their dust as well. With the dry, there’s been plenty of dust here in Trinidad as well.

So this apparently happened. Two 1000-gallon water tanks were stolen from a fire station, reported yesterday by the Trinidad Express Newspapers Facebook page, and since I was on my first cup of coffee I laid into the whole situation.

What’s even weirder about this is that in World War II, when the United States had the Navy base in Chaguramas, according to someone who was Master-At-Arms for the base during that time, there were plenty of water wells in Chaguramas. Before he died, he wondered what had happened to them, and was less than pleased when I laughingly suggested that the United States may have taken them with their ships when they went home.

But just on the points. Between March 2nd and March 11th, the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Services lost 2 tanks. Let’s call that a week because of schedules, and the the author of this post being kind. So in one week, presto magico, 2 tanks that can hold 1,000 gallons of water each disappeared from a Fire Station which is in charge of putting out fires with… say it with me… water. No one noticed. No one saw. They just vanished. To suspect a thief pulled up and stuck them in the trunk of a car seems a stretch. It could be that someone just picked them up and walked away with them and wasn’t noticed by the fire service officers.

Now, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has a way that they deal with crime. They call them ‘anti-crime exercises’ to distinguish them from the rigorous calisthenics never attributed to Trinidad and Tobago police. These exercises in other parts of the world are called roadblocks, which appear on Waze faster than the police can set up, and are done during high traffic periods so that no one can complain that they are causing traffic, instead they are just making it worse, with all those idling engines of vehicles releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate faster than the government can plan for making a plan.

If a criminal gets caught in an ‘anti-crime exercise’, they must want to be caught. So of course it only makes sense in a Trinidad and Tobago sense that to find those 2 water tanks the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service will have roadblocks to try to find them, costing taxpayers more in petroleum products and deodorant than the tanks are actually worth, while when everyone gets home there will be no water to take a shower with.

They likely won’t find the tanks, but the police services have to look good, and the politicians have to say things that sound smart to people who aren’t. That’s a global issue, but it has it’s own flavor in Trinidad and Tobago.

What’s even more amusing about this whole thing is that the Trinidad Express’s post didn’t even have a picture of the fire station in Chaguramas so they used a picture from TriniView.com. How do I know this? In the lower right hand corner, it said in white letters, “Triniview.com”. I didn’t even know that was a site. I grabbed a screenshot of that, though I won’t post it because I don’t know if I want to use an image-of-an-image being used questionably by a media company.

The whole thing is as it is. Sure, I wrote about it in a satirical way – but how else can one look at this? Is it satire? Can reality be satire?

I’m sure I don’t know.

Today I picked an example from Trinidad and Tobago. There are plenty around the world happening every day, where fiction writers keep throwing away half-finished books as they read the news while unscrupulous people who admit that they aren’t writers do adverts on how to sell books and make thousands of dollars a day… from AI generated content.

In a world that doesn’t make sense, that seems to fit too. This stuff happens every day.

The masses just accept it.

  1. “Dry On Ideas“, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, Saturday, 9 March 2024. ↩︎

Much Ado About Samoan Agreement.

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I was sitting in a friend’s office – I seem to be doing that more frequently these days – when we started talking about what I had skimmed in the headlines. Something about this agreement being a sign of the Apocalypse or something.

Clearly, I’m joking, but maybe I’m not. I’m not invested in this particular conversation, but my friends are so it’s an academic exercise at best. They were fishing for what I thought about having children learn about what I can best describe as a new concept of sexuality and whether it should be taught in schools.

Whenever I hit a topic like this, I admit my biases up front because I generally don’t view things the same. In this case, I glanced at the headlines, laughed a little and moved on with my life because any agreements are because of trade, and the reason Trinidad and Tobago is not in as good a position to negotiate anything is because of the mismanagement of the government over the years. I’m not pointing at one administration or party. I’m pointing at both.

So for me, that summarized the issue well.

But my friend has kids, nieces and nephews that could be affected, and I did notice it in a few headlines I looked at in the store. Front page news, this, because homophobia is still pretty stylish in Trinidad and Tobago. Getting into shades of sexuality in a country where heterosexual men and women ‘wine’ at, on, or through each other might be easier except it’s, for some strange reason, not. Most people I know my stance on it: I. Don’t. Care.

And no, that doesn’t mean I condone or condemn anything. I keep my sexuality tidily locked up somewhere. I think it’s in the back behind my old jeans in the closet. I could go look for it, I suppose, but what I do know is that if your sex life doesn’t affect me, I don’t care. It’s not my business. You like your sex, that sex, that’s great. Once everyone is a consenting adult and you don’t feel this need to give me details, I’m great. I’ll congratulate you if you find someone you’re happy with, but I’m not interested in the dirty details.

Others, however, seem to care a lot about what other people do and want to control it, and this has caused people to stand up for themselves, which has in turn caused a bunch of hostility when at the core of it all it’s really about authoritarianism versus liberty. We’ll get back to that point.

This being Sunday, I decided to poke around about this ‘Samoan Agreement’.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Catholic News TT gave us, “Economic Carrots with Ideological Strings“. Archbishop Gordon is more overt with, “‘EU imposing ideology that is not ours’“, which was even echoed in Barbados. Other articles from Trinidad and Tobago seem to rehash the same thing.

Then I caught what the Prime Minister of St. Vincent said and he mentioned the 400 page document.

It struck me in reading all this uninteresting drivel. So I found the Samoan Agreement here, which links to the 403 page PDF of the Samoan Agreement. Strangely, at no point in the document itself do they call it the ‘Samoan Agreement’, which is kind of dumb. Yet, it is the Samoan Agreement, apparently.

It has nothing about abortions, homosexuality, etc. It talks a lot about human rights, it’s worded ambiguously enough that wherever a nation’s legislation and morality lands, it’s pretty simple. It requires no changes to the curriculum. Go search the document. If you find something, do something wonderful that no one has done yet: Cite it.

It may make babies be born naked, and we all know they have the right to be clothed at birth, but since this unlikely to be possible soon, I’d suggest we table it.

So now I’ll get back to that authoritarianism versus liberty thing again. Authoritarianism is blaming another for authoritarianism because authoritarianism loves the whole ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ argument. Authoritarianism is about doing what someone else wants, liberty is about doing what you want without impacting others.

From what I read, the Samoan Agreement simply says, “We agree to a standard of human rights which are necessarily ambiguous because no one can agree on them in practice.” Sex education? Sure, but it doesn’t specify a curriculum. It doesn’t really specify anything.

They’ll say, “Well, one day it could mean…” and maybe that’s true. But it is not this day. No one is being threatened by the agreement. In fact, religion shows up 4 times and they’re not telling people that they have to be of a certain religion.

Human Rights include the right to be properly informed. If you’re going to start a panic, at least cite where you got it from.

The Patch.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

This was once a lush valley, the lowest parts claimed by filling in swampland, a fact that the occupants of the valley become dreadfully reminded of during flash flooding in rainy season – when rainy season was more distinct from dry season.

The greying of that boundary speaks to a larger change in the global climate on this roughly 4,768 km2 (1,841 sq. miles) island, 10.5 degrees North of the Equator, or 5.5 degrees North of the doldrums.

It’s warmed up significantly over the years, so as I cast my eyes over the valley, sipping my coffee, my eyes catch something on the distant hill, something I had noticed before but this morning caught my fancy.

If I just used my binoculars, I would just write about what I saw, but because of the wonders of camera technology on phones, I zoomed in a bit closer.

Over the decades, the Diego Martin valley in Trinidad and Tobago has been home to an increasing population, though a read of the of the environmental report for an overpass project showed a decrease in population with an increase in traffic.

More people are driving now that the Four Roads Tram station, a part of a larger transportation grid that serviced the population (lovely history through that link). I don’t know that if the tramways were ever a part of the more official Trinidad Government Railway, which in 2008 seemed like it would see a resurrection of sorts but was canceled in 2010. I don’t know why.

It’s easy for me this morning to picture this lush valley becoming peopled over time. Galvanize roofs would have shown over time, then the rise of concrete, of infrastructure would have begun carving paths through the valley.

Thought of slowly enough, visualized in my mind I can almost see the concrete structures in the valley growing like some strange creatures in the valley, seemingly feeding off the valley’s flora and fauna as they grew, light pushing back the nocturnal creatures, noise of human progress clamoring through a once lush valley. The mosquitoes were likely quite happy before air conditioning.

Ever so slowly, the concrete crept up the hill, seemingly trying to escape, to overflow, but it has not yet. It is still a work in progress, with the clearing of the side of the hills being done sometimes for small agriculture, but more and more for housing, removing the roots of that which once held the hill together. Landslides are seemingly something that happen to other people who then clamor for government assistance. Economics, governance, it’s all related somehow – and the individuals just trying to get by are more interested in the current situation than even the near future.

I don’t know the story of that bare spot, who created it, whose land it’s on. I don’t know. I simply see it and wonder why it’s done. Some might think it short sighted, which of course it is, but when you need to survive, you find ways.

I can’t judge the individual. I won’t. We all need to get by, and the Trinidad and Tobago economy leaves much to be desired despite grand press briefings. There are people in poverty. I see people begging in the area, and young aspiring entrepreneurs were washing windshields at stoplights to buy their Kentucky Fried Chicken or sandwiches from the pharmacy nearby until the government put a roundabout where once there were lights.

I don’t know all the details, and I’m sure somewhere, some committee that takes no accountability (that’s what committees are for) decided to do as they do. As they do. But I watch now, removing the concrete in my mind and wondering what it was like long before – and I am part of the problem, drinking my coffee watching this. I cannot afford the luxury of not being a part of what is going on, though I can say I have no guilt. I simply wonder what it was like before.

We humans hate locusts, and yet, over a longer span, we seem to do the same thing. Curious, I find the mean temperature in Trinidad over the years (link through image below).

I’m pretty sure changes to the valley didn’t affect the temperature, but I remembered it because of an informal conversation regarding old pictures of Trinidad and Tobago, where people wore the trappings of the English and we wondered how they could, as warm as it is. It ends up, Trinidad and Tobago, 5.5 degrees North of the Doldrums, was significantly cooler 100 years ago.

It certainly could not be the fault of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, whose climate is determined by the winds heading to and from the equator, where the Saharan dust visits annually. It would have to be global in nature.

Does it really matter that patch being cleared in the grand scheme of things? Infinitesimal, but everything until added up seems that way. Yet the world is trying to make changes, and they’re sending consultants and technology at a steep price to the region to tell people what they need to do to roll things back, straining the economy with hybrid car batteries that are more expensive than the cars themselves. Landfills gobble up the circuit boards, and rain flash floods everything, seemingly, but the reservoirs.

I wonder what someone in the area will think about this in 100 years, with 100 more years of data. I don’t know, but I felt like writing it today because…

One patch caught my eye.

A Hurricane of Eyelashes.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

There are times I truly wonder about the Caribbean region. It seems that the world spins more slowly in this little equatorial region, seemingly immune to advancements that aren’t at least 20 years old. As more people travel from the region to other parts of the world, they see it too.

It’s peculiar to watch world events unfolding, with advances in science and technology, where people from the Caribbean or with Caribbean roots play their role. Their nations are quick to claim them, though for the most part these achievements were individual. They’ll show up in local newspapers from time to time, a beacon of hope for the youth who have hope and an insult to those who don’t.

Which have hope? Which do not? I cannot say. To have hope is a strange curse in some ways, to be able to find ways beyond the curtailment of one’s socioeconomic position. To have hope is to dream, and while the Caribbean is a place many dream of visiting, so many times I have seen dreams die beneath the wheels of the corroded wheels that colonial powers left behind. Yet there is hope.

These individuals navigated beyond the shores of land masses in the equatorial regions of the Western hemisphere to find their shoulders against larger wheels, but not alone. They are part of a group of people that work together, though sometimes it does not seem that way, to press forward and impress upon the future the sculpture of a collective dream.

And then, those left behind, the masses, must look to them to claim vicarious success.

This does not differ much from the others from around the world who do the same. Yet, one does not truly understand the level of effort it takes to get past the escape velocity of the Caribbean’s inertia. I have seen it. I have done it, too, but my escape velocity was easier because of the accident of geography of my birth, but I know what it takes, I have seen what it takes, and I also know that what it gives sometimes is a fleeting fame in a local newspaper riddled with myopia of Caribbean bureaucracy.

On Saturday, perusing a newspaper someone left at a coffee shop, I came across this.

The jokes write themselves. This was my introduction to Roosevelt Skerrit, the CARICOM Chairman. It’s unfair, so I ask he not be judged by this unfortunate article. The meat of the article could easily have become about buying local, but I sense that he most emphatically expounded those fake eyelashes.

It’s not a bad hook, really, but I’d suggest it was a misguided hook.

My immediate thought was that there must be a lot of fake eyelashes in Dominica, which must be a real liability during hurricane season – but I know women from Dominica, and not one of them I know wore fake eyelashes that I could tell. Maybe the escape velocity of Dominica costs fake eyelashes. But when you drill down to his point – which the headline distracts from – we get to some interesting issues.

He’s talking about how men rob, steal and kill to maintain high maintenance women. This, coming from any politician, is at best mildly amusing, but if we can get past that the headline attacks the women for buying fake eyelashes, his point is that high maintenance women indirectly cause crime because men have to maintain them. He did not make the point, maybe that it’s because men feel they need to maintain them.

Let me tell you a secret, my fellow men, and ladies, I don’t care if you hear: You don’t need high maintenance women. That should be the crux of the message to men, and that it has to be repeated after millenia of we men going after high maintenance women tells us that it’s not likely to change any time soon. He didn’t talk about the media glamorizing high maintenance women (whose ass broke the Internet?), he didn’t talk about the media glamorizing supporting high maintenance women as some twisted rite of manhood. That battle has been lost, Pandora long escaped, because it’s an unfortunate aspect of human nature.

Women who want powerful men are taught to use their assets, and men are taught to get women with such assets they must be powerful. The question is really about what is considered ‘powerful’, maybe, and politicians as a group make the case for this more visibly than criminals, where there is a difference between the two.

Speaking for myself – I’m beginning to wonder exactly how many fake eyelashes it will take to change an economy, or reduce crime. Or start a hurricane. Or stop one.

Murakami On The Elevator

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As I got home, walking to the elevator, I was still pondering the fun, “Which came first, the purse or the lack of pockets?” question in my mind. I don’t really want to know the answer, it’s just fun to consider.

Not everything needs answers.

I’d given up coming up with theories on the ffft-ffft lady.

Not everything has answers.

On the way there, my trains of thought – I never have just one train going – were interrupted by some friendly faces. A newly married couple, I know he sells insurance and is generally a nice guy, while his new wife is still a bit of a mystery to me. She’s nice, polite, and likes coffee, which makes her a better human being than him in my eyes.

He doesn’t drink coffee. That seems sinful after all the wars and empires involved in bringing coffee from Ethiopia to the rest of the world, but what I consider sinful is subjective.

We have polite conversation, and going up in the elevator, he spots my book. I had returned home early because I was thinking of meaning and wanted to get that writing done and didn’t want to get lost in another group of trains of thought, so I had my receipt from the coffee shop sticking out from the pages.

“What are you reading?”, he asks.

“Oh, some Murakami. I haven’t read this book in some years and decided to revisit it.”, I respond.

His eyes blank, he has nowhere to go with that. It’s not something that is standard fare in Trinidad and Tobago, I suppose, so I try to be helpful.

“It’s where that quote about the storm comes from. How when you come out of the storm you’re never the same as when you went in.”

This, according to his facial expression, did not help either, but the idea began to toss around in his head.

“OK”, he says, as I exit the elevator. He never struck me as a reader, but then most of the literati in Trinidad and Tobago have an insane focus on the Caribbean and Caribbean authors, enough so that in some ways Trinidad and Tobago is a tidal pool, where ideas wash in mainly from distilled island authors.

At least that’s my experience, what I have observed, and it’s purely anecdotal. To me, though, if you have not read Haruki Murakami, you’re missing a bit of life.

Suddenly, as I unlocked my door, I laughed to myself.

I had just done an elevator pitch of, “Kafka on the Shore” without even knowing it.

I hate elevator pitches.

The Contrasts.

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The sunset yesterday evening was intense, like the next 2 days of weather will be here in Trinidad and Tobago. The rains beat out their own rhythm, sometimes with the glancing blows of high wind, sometimes not, and in the Northwest of Trinidad it has been… unpredictable.

Before I left for an appointment today, it was raining one way, then another, bamboo nearby was sheared by the wind. I found it exhilarating. I always have enjoyed a good storm, but today it was only a few hours where I live, with a sunset as above. In South Trinidad, though, I imagine it was much worse, with people still having been flooded from past days.

It’s disappointing, really. The same problems keep coming back while the politicians point at each others for local elections. The flooding has been happening more frequently recently, but the Water and Sewage Company of Trinidad and Tobago somehow never seems to have enough water in the reservoir. There’s too many levels of bureaucracy, not enough accountability, and no effective change – but the government of course wants to bring back a property tax based on what someone guesstimates you can rent a property for.

Nature has no time for that.

There is brave talk about electric cars, and hybrids, but the state owned Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission has problems with the grid off and on, at least where I am. It’s hard to imagine the grid charging so many cars every night. I’ve heard the batteries for the cars cost sometimes more than the cars themselves to replace sometimes. All in the name of ‘saving the planet’ which will well be here long after we are not.

The reality is that if these islands, among all the other islands, went and did everything right, from renewable energy to carbon footprints, it wouldn’t have much of an effect on the global climate because these nations, while polluting, aren’t the core of it. For their trouble, they import everything they are told to at high costs, but the global situation’s problems are really in the larger nations that export these things to the smaller nations. “This is good for the climate!”

The woman with a hungry child on the corner has more immediate concerns.

Since Trinidad and Tobago refuses to believe it can produce it’s own technology solutions, hampered by the failed attempts by government to innovate. Big businesses thrive, small businesses die, and everyone wants to start a small business. Big businesses largely import things and sell them to people. Small businesses try to make local things. The bias, as it is, is evident.

The batteries for the cars will end up in the local dumps, likely. Poisoning ground water, like old cell phones and computers do. Politicians will vie to be elected while not actually doing anything, and the shell game of government corporations absolves all from blame.

It is, in it’s own right, a beautiful dystopia at certain hours, populated with a majority of good people who do not go out at night as much – partly economics, partly crime. The crime of the young has become more personal, more painful to the victims, symptoms of a deep economic divide that the government regularly excavates. It’s not an economic divide, really. It’s a moat.

It can be depressing to see on a daily basis. At busy intersections, we see women with children holding up signs with lists of what they need. There are too many for most to help. This was once a rich country. What happened?

I look toward the west, toward Venezuela, another nation which was rich – and could still be rich. I deal with Venezuelans fairly frequently, and while some call them a plague, I see the hard working immigrants that build countries given the right tools. This fresh blood could be an asset. There are intelligent people here, talented people, who in a land where titles mean more than merit, find no place here. They dream.

It’s not too much to ask for a better tomorrow, particularly if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity. I see it almost every day, contrasted against BMWs and Range Rovers while police escort Ministers through the traffic they are responsible for.

These contrasts are much like the sunset. At certain times, beautiful. The rains will come again tomorrow, properties will be flooded, government will posture yet again, and we’ll see what the sunset looks like tomorrow.

It is in it’s own way Groundhog day in a nation with no groundhogs.

Colonialism, Ukraine and the Caribbean Perspective

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It was a quiet day in Trinidad so I opted to go have a beer, which of course lends itself to another beer. During that time I struck up a conversation with a woman who, when the invasion of Ukraine came up, she said easily that she supported Putin. Mind you, she did not say Russia, but Putin, which is interesting in how the world characterizes the conflict.

She knew I support Ukraine when she said it, and there was no animosity in how she said it, so I asked her why. She looked at me perplexed, and I said, “Well, we’re having a good adult conversation, we have different perspectives on something in another part of the world and I’m curious why you feel the way you do.” After a brief pause, she said she was tired of the United States hegemony that Putin talks about.

I nodded in agreement and said, “Yes, that is true, and the past few decades haven’t been the best for the United States and foreign policy.” Honestly, they haven’t regardless of how you feel about anything; domestic issues within the United States have echoed across the world in their conflicted ways with changes of Presidency, from George W. Bush to the present Joe Biden.

I continued, “Yet the killing of civilians, torture and rapes can’t be easy to support. Like in Bucha.” She looked down, conflicted, as I continued, “Most people I know don’t realize that the Ukrainians were colonized, and that their former colonial masters are trying to take them over again – which would be like the British showing up with warships here and pummeling civilian targets until we were a colony again.”

“Colonized?”

And that’s where the conversation becomes interesting in the Caribbean, and I imagine in Latin America and Africa. ‘Colonization’ is not an idle word, it is a loaded word filled with history, of economics, and of attempting to catch up while some maintain what is called a ‘colonial mentality’. It’s something I’ve heard in Latin America and Caribbean more than once, almost always associated with claims, real and some imagined (completely about personal biases), of racial subjugation, which is probably why Latin America and the Caribbean, and perhaps even Africa, don’t see Ukraine as a former colony of the USSR.

So I compared the Holodomor to the famines in India under British rule. Intentionality in both groupings is a matter of debate by people who like to spend time debating such things, but there is no question that they happened – and in the case of the Holodomor, roughly a decade after the Bolsheviks made a violently convincing ‘argument’ that Ukraine was ‘The Ukraine’. If you wish to irritate someone from Ukraine, call it ‘The Ukraine’. Depending on the context, you may be gently, firmly, or belligerently corrected.

Then I talked about the oil in the Donbas region, which I mentioned not too long ago, and about the messy aspects of democracy and free speech that aren’t permitted in Russia.

The conversation remained pleasant, not a discussion of who was right or wrong. There was searching the internet on mobile phones, and a sincere discussion that lasted for a few beers that morphed into China’s inroads into Trinidad and Tobago, about how economically China has been colonizing former colonies of other nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and how that impacts what we hear. You don’t see much in that regard, but China has sway and where China has sway, the Russian voice is heard more loudly because of China’s benign status about the invasion of Ukraine. There is no form of ‘legal’ invasion, by definition an invasion is illegal. If you want to argue, feel free to tell me when an invasion is legal.

And this leads to the echo chambers of the Global South – in this case, the echo chambers of the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. People and nations within these regions know well what it’s like when someone else speaks for them and writes their history, yet because they are in the Global South they are most easily influenced by Russian media about fairy tale special military operations occur without the rape and torture of civilians. Yet those fairy tale special military operations where these things do not happen simply don’t exist. And without realizing it, without even questioning because the day to day issues of life keep the brain busy, they unconsciously support the attempted recolonization of those who have much in common with themselves, and in rebelling against one hegemony they support another.

Retirement Eclipse.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

eclipseI’ve grown used to not worrying about things. It’s a comfortable way to live, like a hobbit in the Shire, having done my travels and having avoided coming how with any rings. I’m content, my health is better, and I sleep well at night – something that I’ve not been able to do since I was an infant. I may not live a life many people want but it is a life I have been content with. I’ve been writing a lot more. Some of it has even managed to slowly become something like a book.

I’d forgotten that I’d promised to attend the 13th Caribbean Internet Governance Forum at a local hub here in Trinidad and Tobago for at least one day. Flattery was tried to get me to go, and that almost never works because I don’t believe thinking highly of one’s self is of worth – knowing one’s value is. And in the end, it was the latter that got that promise out of me. From there, it was a simple matter of me keeping my word.

Well, it wasn’t a simple matter. The morning of, as I sipped my coffee and planned the day as I usually do, I realized just how much I didn’t want to go. For about 15 minutes, I toyed with the idea of saying I would come on the last day… but I had given my word, and I had written a day, so I could not do otherwise. Instead, I thought about why I didn’t want to go. Here’s what I came up with. I expected:

  1. The organization of the event to be done on the cheap, with glaring issues, and with inhibited participation.
  2. To hear much the same things I had heard before.
  3. To see more bureaucracy being created to try to change things, which is exceptional in that bureaucracy is created so things do not change. (Read James Gleick’s book, “Faster”).
  4. I would meet new people who would be thinking that these problems were all new and that we hadn’t been working on them.
  5. I would meet old people who had gotten so lost in the details that the larger picture was not as clear to them anymore (it happens; don’t protest too much).
  6. I would have to listen to bureaucratic doublespeak, something more tedious than Latin because Latin has the good sense to be accurate and does not tolerate ambiguity. Bureaucratese, on the other hand…
  7. I would end up involved since so few people are involved and engaged.

And, as it happens, I was exactly right. 

The Bret of Different Skies.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

NASA Sees Bret, Cindy and DoraIt’s no surprise, really.

Some cyclone became a Tropical Storm, and that Tropical Storm gained a name. Bret. An unimaginative editor or writer at the Trinidad Express newspaper quickly dubbed it ‘Bad Bret’. Now Bret has a price tag of a billion dollars. Politicians have resorted to… oh, I suppose you should call it politics though it resembles the refuse on the floor of a flooded kitchen, recently pumped out, the smell of decay evident.

It was all fairly predictable, and I truly wanted to write something funny about it – but in the end, I was sick after having mopped up Brett’s drippings from a roof all night and I haven’t been feeling very funny. In fact, it’s the beginnings of a dull rage.

Trinidad and Tobago has a love affair with a few things. It’s important to understand this.

Litter

Let’s take that low hanging fruit. The drainage is typically filled with rubbish, and that rubbish did not magically appear there. It did not suddenly get warped in from another dimension.

People threw it on the ground, it ends up in drains, drains lead to rivers… and so on. So, when you occlude waterways… well, let’s put it this way: Trinidad didn’t flood as much as it had a stroke from living a poor lifestyle, plastic plaque on it’s arteries finally stopping the flow and creating the hemorrhage that people are complaining about now.

Lack of Planning

Forget for a moment the technology failures surrounding Bret that I documented. Let’s not talk about the Minister and Minister, Prime, out playing golf – because, really, if I were the Prime Minister I would be expecting people to do their jobs and know that my job would come after. Personally, I might have shot some pool.

The point here is that there were people who were supposed to be doing jobs. The day before Bret struck, my social media accounts were filled with a long list of who would be closed after Bret, including Tobago’s governmental offices. The Prime Minister would come out and say that people in government offices should come out to work. I’m not sure what he meant, but what I thought was that the one time that government offices need to be open and dependable would be the day after a potential disaster. Instead, this all beckoned the bacchanal of the Prime Minister not caring. I’ll stop there with that because calling political opponents names is also something I’ll be touching on.

In some ways Trinidad and Tobago is a Libertarian paradise. There are Laws for building that are conveniently enforced, there is some rudimentary land Law that puts private landowners in financial straitjackets when it comes to people building on their land. Nevermind electric connections or water connections. Someone always knows someone.

By the time you could get an injunction, you might have 3 generations of a family in it – and the police, despite it being trespass, even with a surveyor present, will tell you that it’s a Civil matter, and that you should go to a lawyer. All of this will require High Court, which means it’s not cheap and it’s a long and arduous process – which culminates, unpredictably, on either the landowner ‘winning’ – where the house is torn down at their expense, with public outcry… or the landowner ‘losing’, where some other arrangement is come to.

At no point in all of this do you hear about whether it was a good place to build a house. At no point in all of this do you hear about whether there’s good drainage. So much time could be saved before a High Court matter by dealing with practical issues, but instead the options are very limited and time consuming by default. In fact, if you blink, a landowner has to go about proving that the lands belong to he or her while the person building a house doesn’t have to prove anything. Wait, what?

And if it’s government land, that’s another problem altogether.

So that’s the base layer – what I call ‘vikey-vike’ development. If Town & Country planning actually rolled through flooded areas, should we bet on what percentage of homes would have plans?

Let’s not get into Regional Corporations going rogue, running roads on private lands based on the requests of some people… with no plans filed. Nothing.

So, this has been happening for decades. It creates it’s own problems of infrastructure, which you would expect, but it also caused some call to action – the government made some weak steps toward developing infrastructure in housing schemes, etc, but they were typically as well conceived as a stillborn. This is to say that they were well conceived, but conception is not the issue – bringing things to term is. And, really, Trinidad and Tobago isn’t very good at taking things to term. Since my earliest memories of Trinidad and Tobago, the Godinot bridge and Mosquito Creek were being widened. 2 Attempts so far have only compounded flooding issues rather than resolve them.

Oh, there’s fire under this pot. Plenty of lack of planning.

Substandard Projects

Speaking of substandard projects, here’s another problem. If, for example, there’s a WASA project going on – water pipes – and there are materials brought to do it – do you know how much of those materials are actually used? Do you know how much are sold by people who aren’t getting paid but have bills to pay?

I’m sure I don’t. I’m sure that every piece of material for a project is used as it is supposed to, and that none of it is sold. I’m sure that everyone is paid on time, and I’m sure that there are no problems like that. I’m also sure that I have been sarcastic in every sentence of this paragraph save this one.

So, a few years down the road, when a pipe fails or a drain collapses or is occluded, it becomes an emergency then that could have prevented during the project… simply by paying people.

Unless, of course, they order extra materials to sell ,which becomes a taxpayer issue and is not relevant to flooding.

Soap Opera Politics.

Even before the rains began I could picture the Members of Parliament in their tall boots, firing off as much political rhetoric as they could. And of course, distributing things. People want to be coddled, to be seen in their distress – but to use that as a political soapbox is as abusive as the rains themselves, even if the people do not feel abused. It’s amazing what sorts of abuse people will consider love if that’s all they know.

This just makes matters worse, really, particularly when it comes to floods. Playing on people’s emotions is the worst part of politics, particularly stirring the pot of anger when it has no productive way to come out. And it’s not to say that it’s a matter of who is in power – it’s what we call a pappyshow in Trinidad. Everyone acts as if they are concerned now when they did not make their concerns concrete before.

Show me hot air blowing after Bret, I’ll show you air that was not moving before it.

“God Is a Trini”

Well, if you’re not an atheist, that’s a hopeful thing to say, but it’s about as true as saying that any other abstract concept is a Trini. That anything that people pray to is a Trini. That anything that matters is a Trini. That a Trini is omnipotent.

“Pardon me, your omnipotence, Your Honourable Trini-Ness – your ass is soaked.”

And What Happens Next?

It’s all as if we live under different skies. Different perspectives of the same problems.

Apparently the politics hit the level of accusations of racism yesterday in Parliament – you’d think that a group of professionals that were elected could work together for the common good, but in the end it is not so. I won’t even do you the discourtesy of linking to articles regarding it because there is no journalism to be found.

Personal differences, high emotions, what have you – people were elected to do a job to govern the country and are always somehow doing their utmost not to work together.

It’s one of the wonders of Trinidad and Tobago, eclipsing the Pitch Lake – the illusion of professional governance, of working together. If there is only one thing to blame for the state of the flooded areas in Trinidad and Tobago, I would say it has been decades of politics that have robbed the citizens of progress. Of followers that will not criticize their own and will defend til death (or drunken stupor) their candidates of choice.

Nothing changes. The waters will recede, life will go on. Whoever is Prime Minister will change, or not, but the dysfunction will continue because of the one phrase in T&T everyone knows.

“We like it so.”

One day, people may stumble upon the idea that they live under the same sky, that the Members of Parliament are supposed to work together. Someday they may just elect someone else when their representative doesn’t get them results. Whining doesn’t matter.

But we’d have to get past a lot of other issues, issues that assure the soap opera continues to assure people think they live under different skies.