Trin | Surviving life in Trinidad and Tobago: Do the right thing

PROGRESS

How much time do you spend blaming Bas or Manning for the state of the nation?

How much time did you spend 5 years ago blaming Bas and Manning for the state of the nation?
What are you doing, aside from all your talking, to create change? Are you too busy paying the bills to care about becoming actively involved in politics?

Let's Be Human Beings - Photo - Todd Cole

Do you think our country is headed down a dangerous path? We’ve definitely had our security and our freedom taken from us by despicable criminals and politicians. Criminals now circle us, waiting to prey while we go about our everyday activities.

Are we stuck in a collective apathetic twilight zone, just like our big talk leader who has an excuse for every problem and no real solution?

We trinis have become apolitical, only interested in politics and sometimes even policies when election year comes around.

We have good parents, good sisters and brothers who work very hard. Our elders, religious leaders and community leaders taught us that if we could, that we should do something to help those around us – your families, your community – that we should all step up if we could. When will the time come for you to step up?

We should all blame ourselves for the failure of our country, for electing incompetent leaders, and for the criminal death spiral dividing our homeland. We need to be better-informed, more-involved citizens.

We need to hold our leaders--whatever party they may belong to--accountable for bad decisions.
We need to understand the issues that underlie our country's policies – especially our economic policy -
to understand why we still don’t have an effective crime plan, emergency response system or a legal system with the capacity to deal with the criminal cases bombarding it daily, even though so much money has been spent.

We need to become part of policy making, attend our political meetings, voice our concerns, and demand the facts, no matter which party we support.

We have the resources to eliminate hunger and poverty for every person in our country, for each child to be given an education and a bright future and for our communities to be clean and safe, but we let Government officials waste our tax dollars on half-finished projects like Tarouba stadium while we the people have limited information and resources at our disposal and are blocked in our every effort to demand accountability from Government.

Their friends and they get richer and richer, our money gets thrown at projects that are not feasible. Our decision makers are incompetent.

Thomas Jefferson said that an ignorant nation cannot remain free.

We must certainly be an ignorant nation - we've lived without freedom, in fear and frustration for years, without an effective solution to our problems.

Each one of us has to say no to ignorance, every single one of us must become committed to demanding accountability from all elected officials.

We have to learn to be committed to the future and to policies.

We must be committed to punishing those elected officials who continue to make broken promises, shirk their responsibilities and continue to work to bury the facts with vague responses.

We must be committed to getting involved or else we will continue to sacrifice our safety and way of life to a gang of greedy politicians and thieves.

When it comes to the security of our nation our partisan differences must end.

If you can - take action; get involved in your community’s political group, hell form your own d*mn political group, just become part of the process and educate yourself before election year sneaks up and the biggest bully wins again, or we will continue to endure another 5 years of hell.

We cannot remain an ignorant nation.

If you've been living an apathetic life, wake the hell up before it’s too late. Get involved. Be kind to one another and for Heaven's sake, do the right thing.