Building the Wall

I could not believe my eyes when I read about it in the paper. What sort of perverse plan made its way into the head of our high and mighty leader?

Of all the manner of strategies that our PNM Government could have cooked up to deal with the Beetham and Laventille, I sighed, when I realized how truly fucked not just people like me who detest Manning for his mafia politics, slave master tactics and megalomania are under this man's leadership. He is building a wall to imprison his own PNM-till-ah-dead faithful followers, to remove them from sight, to wish them away so they can't embarrass him when the foreigners arrive next year, to hope these poor suffering people somehow will cease to exist. This was the best the PNM could come up with to improve the quality of life of their most die-hard supporters after the success of CEPEP and election year raises and payouts.

Here is a Prime Minister, who given any choice, is hellbent on choosing the worst, most expensive most unpopular option every single time, whether it involves burning millions of dollars on useless white elephant projects like Tarouba, dismissing all research done to choose the best candidate for the job of Commissioner of Police, charting private planes and island hopping to build a new personal regional alliance without consulting a single person, making sure his rose garden is up to his impeccably fine standards. Watching Trinidad and Tobago self-destruct under Patrick Manning's leadership is a veritable case study in Murphy's Law! Wait, it have anything worse than Murphy's Law?

Attillah Springer's article "Build your great wall" says it well:

"Build a wall around your failures, like you paint circles around potholes. So that people know that it’s there and that you’re not doing something about it.

Build it higher than your determination to be more than just a random collection of shacks. Build it higher than the shame you feel about your black skin that makes you look like one of those lesser people.Build it for your protection. Build it to protect you from yourself.

Build it because this is us and them time. This is after we is weevil time. This is survival of the fittest time and concrete blocks are the way to solve the problems of the people who give you power every five years. Every five years, for 50 years.

Build the wall and lock it and throw away the key. Throw it far, but not too far.

Throw it so that you can find it in another five years when you need to sentence them to five years behind the wall, because Golden Grove is not wall enough and State Prison is not wall enough. And the La Basse’s pollution is not wall enough.

And after the five years of neglect, remember them behind the wall. Take all the buses and all the rum and all the roti and make them jump and wave for your glory. And then send them back behind the wall again with full bellies full of nothing and minds full of your eloquent promises.

Forget proper drainage. Forget penalising the polluting industries. Forget regulating the waste that goes into the dump or at least legislating on the proper disposal or recycling of plastics or electronic waste.

Build your wall because this is the best plaster for this huge, massive, festering, pus-filled sore of a community. Build it and they will sing your praises, because yours is the only name they know and the only one that matters.

Build it to show the world how forward thinking you are. Show the world that even third world people can be hateful and suspicious and racist. Build it and show that colour is no reason for solidarity or sympathy or interest in consultation for the creating of solutions.

Build it weak like the levees in Louisiana. And when the storms come and the people start to try to escape, maybe you’ll also have people waiting to shoot them as they try to break free of your wall. Better build it so that they cannot escape.

Build it better than the mind walls you build when they’re in your failing education system.

Build it better than the walls in their minds that keep youth men on the blocks, their anger looking for any opportunity to manifest and young girls desperate for somebody to mind them.

Build it so that you can escape to your fantasies of civilisation borne out of your obsession to be less like yourself whoever it is that you are.

Build it like you built your own palace as a statement to your absolute contempt for babies dying in under-equipped, inefficiently-run hospitals.

Build it so that you cannot hear their children wheeze or see their young men’s eyes glaze more with anger. Build it because they are the problem to which you have no solution."

Attilah Springer
Trinidad Guardian, October 25th, 2008