Trinidad and Tobago

“Welcome To The Colonies”

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Yesterday was Independence Day in Trinidad and Tobago, complete with parades and traffic schedules that go along with it. There wasn’t the usual amount of national colors, but when I got my eyes tested near the parade route, there were plenty of young men dressed as trees with automatic weapons stationed on corners. I even saw a truck filled with them, as if the Ministry of Agriculture had some greenification project going on.

I don’t know that celebrating independence is anything but a polite lie in any nation. The world is made up of co-dependent nations. I don’t think any nation is truly independent in the strictest sense of the word. I’m not even sure that it would pass a lazy inspection.

Where I live, the service elevator is down causing people to run into each other more. This is generally a good thing. A middle-aged woman asked me why the elevator was down, and I explained about a nearby lightning strike that seemed to have overloaded the circuit board in charge of the frequency of electricity that drives the motor. It’s something most people wouldn’t even know about. It allows the motor to slow without jolting, and since most people have never even imagined that jolting, it’s an ‘invisible’ feature’. Like living in a colony.

The man accompanying her said something in what sounded like a British accent, something about it taking a while to fix, and I said that the provider doesn’t keep those parts on hand. There’s just not enough of a market to bear that expense. I ended with, “Welcome to the Colonies” and a smile.

Indeed. Welcome to the colonies.

Today, I felt like having a Peanut Buster Parfait, so I drove down to the nearest Dairy Queen. They of course did not have the chili hot dog I was also thinking of. A Canadian guy was there – no, I imagine you’re picturing a white Canadian, but it wasn’t. He was getting exasperated himself, complaining McDonalds didn’t have this or that, that Dairy Queen didn’t have this or that, and telling me he would be taking the kids to Pizza Hut later. I told him I wished him luck.

He didn’t drop it, so I simply said, “Welcome to the Colonies.”

He didn’t get it. This is the experience of colonies. Sure, Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from the British Empire in the last century, but it seems it was a part of a larger cost reduction strategy of the British Empire. It’s a small market, run for decades by governments by governments whose level of corruption is a constant topic of discussion. There’s been no diversification of the economy, there’s been no worthwhile attempts to create new revenue streams.

The present government seems to be balancing between Chinese soft power, finding ways to work with Venezuela without irritating the U.S. over the sanctions, and gaming numbers to keep forms of assistance coming in. It’s an election year coming too, so that will be more interesting.

I was mildly surprised that the Dairy Queen didn’t have a cover for the Peanut Buster Parfait. Welcome to the Colonies.

Independence, as anywhere else, is an illusion.

As with any colony, wherever you live, it’s not too hard to find the colonial masters.

How Democracy Died.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

Views From The Cave.

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It’s been an interesting week researching and, for some time, beginning to interact with some select people that give me a break from the flat screens within my cave. Most of it has been spent reading and listening to the latest theories on life, evolution, and the thing being marketed as artificial intelligence.

Interspersed in the writing, you’ll find some things I felt like pointing out that persist on the planet, from strange signs to flattening balls to sell them differently (for the same price).

We humans do some pretty dumb things.

One of my ‘favorite’ things is seeing lowered cars in Trinidad and Tobago behind me, because with the roads as bad as they are, you never know when the geniuses who lowered their cars will swerve or suddenly hit the brakes.

I’m not against lowering cars. I just think you have to be pretty dumb to do it in a country with notoriously bad roads. In my experience, and mainly for humor, I point out that the lower a car is in Trinidad and Tobago, the worse the road is that it’s owner calls home. It’s an expensive form of limbo, leaving behind all manner of exhaust parts on the road.

It’s sort of a willful version of stupidity that affects others on the road. It can’t possibly be ignorance. It’s just that people choose not to care. It’s strange to me.

Then there are the odd signs, like this one that on the surface makes sense – use the stairways during a fire.

Most people don’t even blink when they see signs like this, and yet…

If you actually look at it… Go ahead…

A person is walking down the stairs into either an inferno or is summoning a demon from downstairs.

Now this sort of thing is about placement, and I’m not a graphic artist, but I have to think there would be a better way to do a sign like this. People who lower their cars to drive on bad roads might think they’re supposed to walk into fires.

If that were true, I imagine upset people might be lighting fires at the bottoms of staircases to solve one problem – which I’m betting is illegal anywhere you live, so you should not do that. It would probably involve arson, though I imagine it would be hard to prosecute a case for manslaughter or murder when people willfully walked into the fire.

Still. Don’t do it. I wrote not to do it. Don’t do it.

The picture of meatballs being sold and underneath small sliders being sold just doesn’t look right when I resize it – but the local grocery makes meatballs and then flattens some of them to make ‘sliders’. They charge the same per weight, so it’s not a gimmick.

Some people are apparently just too stupid to think of flattening their own meatballs to make miniature hamburgers.

This – aside from the willful ignorance/stupidity of some – seems to be because no one takes the time to observe and think. Why is that?

Because people are deluged in a world. Overloaded. Some people don’t cope well with it, and based on what I see, it seems to be the majority.

I want to write so much more about this, but instead I’ll simply ask that you take a few moments wherever you are and really take a look at things you normally don’t look at. No, not on social media. Look in the real world.

Go look. Comment what you see.

Triage

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I had some land down in the South of Trinidad that, for a while, was a big part of my life. It caused me to stretch myself in new ways, and it almost always spread me thin with dealing with people nearby because some of those people were intent on expanding their own horizons with my land.

The fact is that they already had, for I had come by it through inheritance – an inheritance, strangely, that I did not want. My father was focused on the people in very adversarial ways, which wasn’t my style – people know this now, but they did not know that then. So, whenever I was around, there was some distrust, but I minded my business, dealt with people honestly even when they didn’t deal with me honestly, and accepted that they were smarter than me so that they would teach me. That worked out well, but it was a strain. Every time someone spoke with me, they seemed to want something, or were angling at something, or were trying to get me on their side against someone else.

That was tiresome.

To make matters worse, family members that had land adjoining were more focused on being adversarial with people down in that area which gave me even more headaches. People would come to me for advice once they got to know me – who to talk to, etc, and I guided them as best I could knowing full well that the people they would be dealing with wouldn’t understand them and wouldn’t want to. I would not say that I understood them myself, but I did understand that I didn’t understand them that well and that it was important to do so. People, after all, are pretty much the same everywhere I had found in my travels.

People need food, shelter, and a place to raise their children safely – and maybe leave something behind for their children.

All of that was troublesome to me. I had gotten good at dealing with people, but my true joy was going out beyond where civilization was on my land, just me, my 4×4, and the ground beneath my feet. I would escape there, sometimes moving things around, sometimes planting things, sometimes just sitting on the tailgate with my feet dangling. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was something I could work with.

I made my own trails, then with license from family members to simply tell them what I saw if I saw encroachment, and with that I drove over much land, making paths where maybe there were paths before but overgrown. The people who saw me out there from a distance thought highly of my vehicles, which I did maintain well, but they didn’t realize it wasn’t the vehicles but the driver. The price for getting stuck was a shovel or a long walk to someone with a tractor – a price which I avoided all but 3 times in a decade.

When I got tired of people, I would just drop the pickup in range and go off into the bush. If I got really dirty, I’d go bathe in one of the ponds. People would comment that I came out of the bush cleaner than when I went in, and there were those that did not wish me well that wanted to follow me but could not. I was unpredictable, and those that had vehicles that were 4×4 did not follow my trails, because I pushed the vehicle to do things that they didn’t.

In the later years, after the government ran a highway through the land and screwed up the drainage, I continued this course but found that the highway had screwed up the drainage and parts of the land had become impassable. I would drive to those boundaries, where almost no one could follow, and sit there on the tailgate, looking around and accepting the truth of the matter.

I was there too late. There was much I could have done had I had the land a decade sooner, or two decades sooner. These were not things of industry and commerce, really, but simply making the place nicer. I hadn’t even been told about the land until the turn of the millennium, though it was owned by the family since 1973. Well, at least mortgaged. No one thought to tell me.

It wasn’t something I was angry or sad about. The realization that I could not do the things I wanted to because I was there too late was not something new. In the emergency room, we saw people too late. In the workshop, we saw equipment too late. So many things I saw too late, so many things that had I just been there a little sooner I could have done more.

Sometimes, things are just too late – and we move on. If we don’t, and we linger on what was already too late, we’ll likely be too late for something else. It’s triage. You do what you can and you move on.

Morning Coffee Thoughts.

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This morning I awoke to the sound of the gentle taps of rain against the window, a welcome change from the tyranny of dust that has plagued my environs for some time. It was peaceful and quiet, and the morning routine lead me out first to my gallery to see the sight of the clouds caressing the opposing hill of the valley, soothing where the brush fires had left naked ground, and hopefully putting out the last embers of them.

Of course, I expect the lights on the hill to go up further this year. Brush fires clearing land has a tendency to grow humans as well as vegetation, and concrete lasts longer than greenery.

This is normally when I would catch up on stuff on Facebook, but I’ve recently given up on that fruitless enterprise. Instead, I got some coffee, sitting and reading the New York Times digital edition on my phone. I’d hit the local news later, but the state of newsrooms in Trinidad and Tobago leaves much to be desired and even though I don’t ask for them, people send out PDF copies of newspapers on WhatsApp all the time. I’m not sure how they get those PDFs, I’m not sure why they share them. Maybe part of the problem with Trinidad and Tobago news is just that – lack of sales. I could do a critique of local news. I think it’s wiser these days not to.

“Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich” caught my eye in the New York Times. It was well written and highlighted problems some nations have, but what I also noticed is that these sorts of articles skip over the Caribbean as if there is a blackout curtain over the islands. This article was no different. I thought for a moment to reach out to the author, Patricia Cohen, but I knew the answer already. I know most of the problems with writing such an article already. CARICOM members never seem to work for the common good because there’s not much common about CARICOM. More than the Caribbean Sea divides the member states.

I headed in with my coffee to the newly redesigned writing area, the rain having now restarted and tapping against the window like popcorn in a microwave. Cleaning the outside of that window is impossible, so dust from the dry and recent works on the hill outside have deposited enough dust on it that eventually I’ll take it out and look for diamonds.

Rain trickles down the small panes now, rinsing the looser dust off. The heat later will cake the remaining dust on. It’s a nice sort of mental camera obscura, allowing me to look up and to the right as I type, watching the sky and trees through a dirty lens, a reminder that all that we see is through a lens.

It’s time to read up a few more things, and to go outside and survey the rain occasionally as it washes the dust from the world outside, this steady and insistent rain. This is much needed rain, rinsing the world, reviving grasses and trees that have been starving for moisture.

It will be a good day for writing, I think. Where most people dream of sunshine, I dream of rain.

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. ↩︎

Trini KFC Drama.

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The front of Kentucky Fried Chicken near West Mall. Note the birds picking at the food, which I jokingly refer to as the meat that they serve based on the diminished size of meals over the years.

Recently there has been some social media posting in Trinidad and Tobago calling for a boycott of Kentucky Fried Chicken after they raised their prices.

Of course, it wasn’t just about prices. The trouble was that Prestige Holdings, the company that runs KFC locally, had announced 56% more profits right before they raised the prices.

I only mention this because I needed something to write about while I’m dealing with the silicon insult. It’s hard to say whether the boycott has been effective in any way. There are plenty of opinions floating around, and Prestige Holdings is being pretty quiet about it. There was some drama about someone who was apparently not a member of Prestige Holdings saying some things. That blew over.

Instead of wild speculation, which there is plenty of on social media, I’ll just give my opinion.

I don’t eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and haven’t for at least 10 years. This was not a boycott on my part. I simply remember when I felt I got value for spending money at KFC, and that time has long passed. If I feel like fried chicken, there are other options, and I daresay better. Royal Castle immediately comes to mind, as does Popeyes. Church’s Chicken is around too.

Yet it’s not a very big part of my diet. Fried chicken is a rarity in my diet. The only people who care about the raised prices are the people who buy from them, and given the value of the meals as well as the state of customer service and cleanliness of locations, there is much to be desired.

There was a time when the biscuit came with a meal. That went away. I think I first started turning away from certain fast food restaurants when they started pushing Pepsi products at me, which I don’t like. From there, the size of chicken pieces fell to pigeon sized pieces. The corn, which we used to get a small cob of, we now get 1/3rd of. The customer service ranges from ‘may I take your order’ to a scale of ‘why are you bothering me?’.

Prestige Holdings also has other restaurants, like Starbucks, Subway, Pizza Hut, and TGIF. They aren’t in the health food business. They never claimed to be.

Starbucks has some of the best customer service in Trinidad and Tobago, but the worst prices for coffee – people often go there for the brand and experience. Subway is a staple, but the sandwiches have diminished in value for the price with the incredible shrinking subs. Pizza Hut I haven’t been to in some time, and TGIF is basically a place where people drink overpriced drinks and eat imported meals heated in a local restaurant.

The truth is that there’s no real value added in any of their restaurants, but suddenly, because they showed increased prices a day or two after they bragged of their increased profits, people became upset.

If that seems silly, on the surface it is. However, the role KFC plays in Trinidad and Tobago is largely for the ‘on the go’ crowd, which includes children who have traveled to school and people who didn’t pack a lunch when they went to work. In that regard, they do provide value. Is it a good value or a bad value? That’s subjective. Given the opportunity, I’d prefer other fare.

It all seems silly to me. There doesn’t need to be a call to boycott. People just have to decide where the value is for them.

KFC has lost it’s value to me. In the 1980s, going to KFC was a treat, and it was something worth doing occasionally. Now, with more flour than chicken and a bigger bottom line than value, everyone does have to make up their own minds.

I remember the value I used to see. It’s simply not there for me, but people still buy it and that would indicate that there is some value to them. Value, though, is dictated by choices, and with the restaurants of Prestige Holdings as ubiquitous as they are, it’s a matter of who has the larger net.

Consider that in 2021, ‘KFC Opened Their 60th Restaurant in Most Penetrated Market‘, a most Freudian headline without substantiation in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. It reads like an advertisement. However, the Trinidad Express got the substantiation in “More KFC outlets per person in T&T compared to any other country“, which reads less like an advertorial, almost resembling a press release but for the sweat of someone who put things between the quotations from the press release.

Maybe we should be asking why people are making that choice rather than calling for a boycott. There are generations who don’t know that there were once bigger pieces of chicken, bigger pieces of corn, etc.

Or, maybe it’s just the way it is. If you find better value for your money, get it.

If you need better choices, find them. Your cardiologist may be upset that they won’t get that yacht, but you can’t always do things to make your doctors wealthy.

Cyclists in Trinidad and Tobago.

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Cyclists don’t make sense to me because even with lanes, with cars driving by, there’s all this carbon monoxide coming out of exhausts and carbon monoxide latches onto hemoglobin faster than oxygen.

I should start with why I’m writing this. This morning, I stopped for coffee before some groceries and noticed a lone Trinidad and Tobago police vehicle following a cyclist on the Trinidad and Tobago version of a highway.

That seemed like a waste of taxpayer money. How many cyclists would be worth it? 3? 7? I don’t know, but 1 police vehicle driving behind one cyclist seems like a waste. On the way to the store, I saw that the group was waiting, and there were about 12 cyclists, so that doesn’t seem like a waste of taxpayer money.

But there were about 16 pickups and cars escorting them. I don’t know who they were. Friends, family, that awkward one night stand from last night who isn’t sure if they’re supposed to be there – all of them driving cars. That’s a lot of gas and diesel to be burning driving around watching spandex covered butts. It seems like joining a yoga class would be a lot less trouble for the same view, but everyone’s different.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there aren’t that many dedicated cyclist lanes. A few decades ago, they made one between San Fernando and Marabella, which no one actually used for a bicycle that I have seen. On an island, it’s hard to add cyclist lanes because there’s not as much space, so that makes sense.

Factor in that without a bicycle lane, traffic forms behind the cyclists which creates more emissions, because when traffic isn’t running smoothly, the accordion effect happens. Every acceleration burns more fuel than a nice, steady speed.

I get the idea of the open road, riding a bicycle as far as a feeling of freedom and self-determination, but when you’ve got more vehicles than cyclists involved, you have to wonder whether cycling is good for the environment. Sure, if there were one car per cyclist, you’re cutting emissions in half per vehicle and yet you’re creating emissions that don’t have to be there. There’s really no environmental argument.

The health argument is one I can roll with, though as this article points out increasing your lifespan 45% by cycling rather than taking the bus can give you the carbon monoxide levels of a smoker. Don’t judge someone who lights a cigarette if you’re cycling in traffic. There’s a fun argument sure to annoy everyone.

I like the idea of cycling, riding a bicycle here and there, but in a tropical country it can be an olfactory disaster wherever you arrive. In Trinidad and Tobago, it makes little sense to me and I know people who ride bicycles and I listen to them talk about it with the same fervor that other hobbyists have. It’s their thing, I get it, and yet…

I don’t get it. If it doesn’t affect other people, it’s no big deal, do whatever you want – but if you’re creating traffic and spending taxpayer’s money, it is affecting other people. Some countries have the bicycle paths, some don’t. Some have trails, some don’t. Cycling ain’t the same everywhere.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t want to say cyclists should stop cycling, yet I also would like to see it practical.

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 Mall

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

In going around and talking to people – I was curious about something – I visited a local mall. As it happened, it gave me a chance to get ahead of a mobile phone bill. I chatted with a few people I knew who were intent in telling me everything but what I had asked them about.

People are strange that way sometimes, avoiding something they don’t want to talk about which makes it harder to figure out why they don’t want to talk about it. Suddenly, I appreciated psychologists a bit more since that’s a fair way to look at their job sometimes.

Journalists have it rough too in this regard. People were sticking to their talking points, things that they had stored up for however long to unload on someone who asked them a question that they didn’t want to answer. I got updates on people’s credit card problems, a few questions about how some companies still could afford to rent mall spots, and even one irate woman asking me what is wrong with me after what appears to be a near break up.

Well, maybe I can tell you what’s wrong with a particular guy, but men in general? I’ve spent absolutely no time considering what’s wrong with men. There’s an angry feminist out there who will probably shout at me about that, but I’m not going to make sweeping generalities about a gender based on the behaviors of a few regardless of how angry people get about it. I don’t go around spouting out things that are wrong with women either. Or anyone else for that matter, and I did encounter what appeared to be a trans pair wandering around.

I boggled momentarily. There was something I thought was odd about the person in a halter top and skirt, so I paid attention rather than ignored and when I realized it was someone somewhere on the gender scale that wasn’t routine in a mall in Trinidad and Tobago. It didn’t bother me until we met eyes, and those were angry eyes. Those were scared eyes, defiant eyes, but not threatening eyes. The eyes of someone who was just trying to be themselves, whoever that may be.

I moved on from that, but it stuck with me a bit because of that look of scared defiance, not knowing how people might react. That person had more backbone than just about everyone I chatted with today. In fact, it could be said it’s the very definition of courage, to do something despite being afraid. It’s natural there be some defiance.

I suppose that’s what’s bothering me these days. I don’t see defiance as much anymore. I’m not saying defiance is always a good thing – it has it’s dark side like everything else – but in certain circumstances, it’s the right response and can only be graded at that point about whether it’s self-destructive or not. That gets us into whether a lack of defiance is self-destructive.

I suppose you’re screwed if you can’t tell the difference, which I imagine is paralyzing.

Maybe I had my answer after all.