WAVE THE FLAG!

31, Aug 1999
On the eve of our 37th year of Independence one is left to ponder certain misgivings. Our founding father, so to speak, told us on this day back in 1962 that we were in fact a "society" but not yet a "nation." And we were left to contemplate on what it takes to make a society, any society, a nation. Was the key to being a nation the coming to the fore of responsible self-government that would knock desperate and disparate, hostile groups thrown together by acts of fate, into a cohesive whole with a mandated mission for modern development? Could there be nationhood without proper rites of passage for manhood and womanhood? Could there be a discussion of the one without an unravelling of the other?

Frantz Fanon exposed for us "the pitfalls of such national consciousness" confined as it were to a mere sense of geography and external trappings and devoid of genuine human transformation. The process must start and end with people.

Today on the eve of our 37th year, the news headlines tell a particular story. A vagrant who is killed by another leaves behind a bank account with some $50,000. He had lived on the streets, by choice, apparently, for the past 20 years, selling bottles for a living and was quite frugal, according to his relatives who claimed that the vagrant was saving to buy himself a house. It brings to mind another bottle-seller, the Rastaman of Laventille who also collected and sold bottles and was struck by the idea to sell "crushed" bottle instead. He began quietly to supply the glassworks factory with crushed bottle and amassed colossal savings.

His undoing came when he went into a particular residential area to purchase a home for some $1.2 million. The conspiracy to undo him stretched from his bankers back to the management of the glassworks factory who quite abruptly stopped the supply contract. In another headline on this eve of Independence, armed young men attempt to rob a fast-food outlet, allegedly to obtain money to purchase clothes and shoes to attend the Lauryn Hill concert on the weekend. The robbery is foiled by security forces and they are forced to shoot their way out. One of the robbers, a father of two young children, was found dead mere hours after in an abandoned house in Arima. He was found naked and there before him was a lit candle and an opened Bible. He had been reading Psalm 23 the Lord is my Shepherd. In the pockets of his trousers they found the $800 he had snatched. The money was completely soaked with his own blood.

Elsewhere, Muslim spokesmen, as do their Hindu counterparts, tell society that their religious doctrines in regard to marriages must not be tampered with. One can only hazard a guess that the society in their view is not equipped to comprehend divine revelations. They wish to continue marrying girls at ages 12 and 14 respectively. Leading feminists are appalled at the idea of babies marrying.

A young woman steals a new born babe from the hospital, puts it in a hand-bag and attempts, without success, to run away.

The chairman of a regional Health Authority acknowledges that a particular hospital requires 700 nurses to properly handle its workload, but does not see it as a crisis if only 200 nurses are at present on staff. But on this eve, it does not stop there. A goodly gentleman who has been nothing but a sycophant for almost all his adult life, suddenly acquires the balls to pave a few acres of the Savannah. He wants the Independence Parade to go on without any mud and so like a thief in the night he begins to pave on his own authority, supposedly without knowing how much the paving will cost nor where he will get the money to pay the contractors. Suddenly he has become so big and bad that he could tamper with a clearly stated legal demand by the owners of the land, who bequeathed this open green space to the people of Port-of-Spain, that it be left as much in its pristine beauty.

All the primary schools of Port-of-Spain, Belmont and Woodbrook use those grounds since most of them have no such facilities readily available as in the East, Central and South. It is not an unknown sight to see streams of children led by their teachers making their way up those feeder routes to the Grand Savannah. When the people of Guyamare blocked the progress of the legitimate highway the powers- that-be had the foresight and common sense to be patient and negotiate. Today on the eve of the 37th are we being suddenly faced with government by fiat? And how are all these twists and turns by desperate and disparate individuals as evidenced by the headlines to be smoothened out in the course of the mission we took on back in 1962?

What is the connection between all these shenanigans? One person sought to use "homelessness" to acquire a "home" and died in the process. Another thrived because of his "creative energies" but precisely because of his new found status, the wielders of key social institutions conspired on "race/class factors" to accomplish his demise and keep him out of where they felt he did not naturally belong. On the other hand, the bandit was done to death through his own wickedness and the lure of the superficial popular culture. Eventually he sought salvation from another "authority", considered great and compassionate, beyond the realities of this world. His obituary seems to suggest that he died "at home", which, if true, means that he , too, was in the process of building a home, "abandoned house" mentioned in the report should have been "unfinished house".

The same authority he appealed to in his eleventh hour, is the same authority to which some people turn to justify the marriages of girl children, in this modern world, once puberty has been attained. And another robber allegedly steals, not money, but a child in attempt to satiate her unfulfilled natural desire to procreate. A most unnatural act motivated by the most natural of all desires.

And in the last two instances, one man with clearly defined authority ignores real crisis, while the other creates an artificial crisis in the quest to attain some illusive authority to ignore the laws of natural justice.

Put all this together and we get a pretty good sense of the depths of our sickness as we struggle to come to terms with the contradictions between individual urges and the probable overall good. We surely need to dig deeper to resolve such contradictions.

It was Tom Paine who said that "man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights ... He therefore deposits his rights in the common stock of society, of which he is part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing. Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right ...

Society and government are not only different, they have different origins. Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness, (moral defects). The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affection, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages discourse, the other creates distinction. The first is a patron, the last a punisher..." How much government is required is dependent on how much we are truly men and women, and how much we cease to be desperate and disparate isolated elements.

The greatest and most just laws are the laws of nature and if we can see our way to live by these natural laws, dictated by the fact that we are social animals, the less government shall have to act as an imposition and the more it shall function as a coordinator of our affairs beholden to no one group or person but to the community as a whole.

Independence is not only about independence from foreign controllers, but more so freedom from control from any body or group or structure above and beyond the people united in their communities of bonded interests. It is also about freedom from individual mavericks. It we wave the flag it must not be for vulgar individualism but for common self-activity like a Carnival band.