martingeorge4law@hotmail.com

Love hurt$

Now there are few people who could love our national airline more than myself. There is no airline in the world that can match the warmth and hospitality of our Bwee.

Its safety record is legendary and there is no stewardess in the world that can give you good treatment, or plenty attitude, like a Bwee stewardess as she walks down the aisle swinging her hips at you.

At JFK in New York, Miami International Airport or even at tiny Grantley Adams in Barbados, there is no more heart-warming a sight than to see your Bwee plane touch down and taxi towards the terminal, or stand hulking, purring, as it takes on passengers and hundreds of bulky bags, suitcases, packages and boxes of all shapes, sizes and colours, most of them overweight as hell, but the person at the counter helped you out and gave you a bligh.

That is your Bwee, that is our Bwee and we love Bwee.

It has been at one and the same time the airline we have loved the most and the airline that we hated and criticised the most.

Who among us has not been stood up interminably by Bwee, as the counter staff play a cat and mouse game with you?

First, by not making any announcement at all about the delay, then when you realise that it’s five minutes to departure time and there’s no aircraft outside, they make a brief announcement about a delay.

Another hour may go by before, they then make an announcement about an expected departure time or expected arrival time.

When those times go by and still nothing after that, they will then tell you about a technical difficulty which developed with the plane and so on and so on, until it’s too late when you realise that the plane is either coming at midnight, or isn’t coming at all today.

By this time you’re too beaten, frazzled and weary and too tired to fight and argue anymore, so you gratefully accept the meal chits they hand out and look for a warm place to curl up for the long haul.

That is your Bwee, that is our Bwee, and we love Bwee. Even for the food, we love our Bwee.

How many airlines in the western world are sensitive or caring enough to routinely cater for those who, for religious or other reasons, are vegetarians, or to provide you with some nice, hot bhaghi and rice with curry chicken as your in-flight meal?

Which other airline offers you that warm, jovial Trini ambience, where after a long time abroad, you could laugh and joke and engage in picong with fellow passengers, and then settle down with a copy of the Trinidad Guardian to catch up on the latest news from good ole T&T?

I flew 16 hours on United Airlines, from Los Angeles to Melbourne, with a single stop in Sydney, and on a plane of 400 people, not a single passenger seemed to laugh or make a joke.

For the entire journey the plane was quiet, save and except for the snoring of my travel companion!

Nobody pulled out a pack of cards to play all fours; nobody had a bottle of White Oak or Johnny Walker Black; nobody even pulled out a box of KFC and started to eat just as they got on board!

This kind of thing could never happen on Bwee.

Sixteen hours in virtual calm and quiet?

Not on your Bwee, not on our Bwee, and we love Bwee!

But sometimes love is a painful thing, a hurtful thing, a bitter thing!

Sometimes you have a child, a husband, a boyfriend, girlfriend, father, or mother, a cousin, a brother or a friend whom you love, but that love is killing you.

The more you try to love that person, the more they appear to be sucking and draining the life force out of you, the more they seem to be taking advantage of your love.

It’s like a child that is the black sheep of the family, constantly taking advantage of the parents’ love, constantly wounding and hurting their hearts, secure in the knowledge that the parents will always take them back with open arms.

Bwee, it hurts me to say this, but our love for you is killing us!

You’ve become like the son or daughter who’s on drugs, who keeps demanding more and more from the parents in order to feed the habit.

The parent, with tears in her eyes, gives the child a box of food, knowing full well he’s taking it down the road to sell to buy drugs, but how could a mother turn away a son, a grown man, who stands before her crying, and babbling, begging for food?

Our son, Bwee, is more than 50 years old now.

As parents we have fed and nurtured him, from birth through adolescence, through his twenties, thirties and forties.

All the way we have fiercely defended him against his critics, and driven by that blind but intense parental instinct which will never give up on a child, always looking for hope, always seeing the bright side—“look, for the first time in 50 years he showed a profit, that is a sign that he will come good and become profitable.”

But before you know it, he’s back again, he’s there sucking at the breast again, nursing, feeding, trying to crawl back up in the womb for you to shelter him, protect him, bail him out again, and again, and again.

One hundred million dollars here, $150 million there, now $222 million, in a never-ending parasitic relationship which slowly sucks all of the lifeblood, the energy and the love out of the parent.

Now that Mr Arthur Lok Jack has taken over at Bwee, we can only hope that he will not continue to take advantage of our paternal and perennial love for Bwee.

We hope that he will not continue to inflict it upon us as a people, because we will never have the heart to pull the plug!

Look at the parents of Terry Schaivo?

We will never find it in our hearts to chase Bwee away, but maybe King Arthur will have the courage to lead Bwee quietly out of the barn and shoot it, or allow it to commit some sort of suicide, relieving us once and for all, of this Burden We Insist on Accepting.