The other night I checked out a film at the Studio Film Club run by two artist bredrins Che and Peter and I thank Jah for them offering us an alternative to the typical boring uninspired Hollywood fare that mainstream cinemas dumb down the general public with.

It was called La Vida es Silbar—Life is to whistle—and it was one of those classic Cuban sorts, all fabulist and passionate. Dancing a thin line between magical realism and the more brutish truths of everyday life, leaving you feeling to go out into the world and find those absurdities that make living all the more colourful and enjoyable.

Anyway, one of the many things going on this film was a woman who fainted every time someone around her says the word “sex.” We see other arbitrary people faint for no logical reason. And then eventually the woman gives in and goes to see a shrink. The doctor reveals to her that this fainting thing is a disease that’s stricken many people in the population.

She flees in disbelief and he follows her through the streets shouting arbitrary words like “freedom,” “opportunism,” “fear of the truth.” And people drop like flies and we, safe real world, all laugh kif kif. But it’s a serious laugh we were all laughing, in a way.

He explains to the woman the problem is that different people have words, thoughts, actions that cast the fear of JesusAllahShivaBuddhaShango into their hearts. Things that paralyse their progress.

A good meditation it was for me. To feel that fear resonate from a screen across nation language and storytelling style.

A good meditation at a time when everybody is expectantly waiting for something to happen, while others seek change actively and Ogun clears a path to make it possible.

I guess that’s why it’s so important to see films like that. To remind us all the time to be watchful of the value of speaking our truths. Now more than ever.

For people, regular Trinbago people, to come out of their hiding places and move their genteel grocery aisle and boisterous rum shop conversations into public spaces. Speak their truths aloud without fear that we live in the kind of backward so-called democracy that attempts to stifle the voices of the people. We all have to be our own chantuelles. Be the voices that subvert this limp-wristed wishy-washy approach to democracy.

Everybody is searching for something. Even our political leaders who are supposed to have some skill at this whole leadership thing.

Search if you must. Seek knowledge by all means. But if you must learn from somebody, Father Patrick, go south, learn from Evo Morales.

Throw away the third world oppressors handbook you got from Uncle Sam and his multinational emissaries. They lie to you, Father. The term “right wing environmentalist” is about as oxymoronic as a risk-free aluminium smelter.

The issue is not the issue. It’s not crime or smelters or education or health. The real big issue underlying all is that we have a right to demand more and better of our leaders. That we have a right to question every decision that affects us, because these leaders have demonstrable lack of ideas, don’t talk for ideology.

We have a right to demand an end to the repeating of mistakes. We have a responsibility to ourselves and our children, those here and those as yet unborn, to learn the lessons of our history.

We have to reach to a point where we will no longer have to invoke the spirit of Butler. When young soldiers will not be moved to take over their barracks out of frustration at a system that seeks to divide them from the people they come from, the people they are supposed to serve.

This time let the revolution be about all of us changing our thinking. Once and for all. This every-20-years-upheaval thing is getting a bit boring.

Not for a timing. We have to get out of this ten-days/five-years mentality. Let’s not have to reinvent the wheel and rethink our vision only when the oil has run out and the natural gas has been given away and we are left with a whole heap of environmental catastrophes and no infrastructure to deal with them.

Let us say that we want development but that we want it in a clean and sustainable and equitable way that doesn’t compromise us socially, economically, ecologically.

Get away from the deafening roar of construction, turn down the hard pong a bit. Listen to the quiet voices calling for the c-word: change. It’s not a bad thing.

We have to stop fainting, collapsing, closing our ears off to the things about us that are wrong and seek a new true truth or be doomed to stay in this limbo between possible greatness and certain destruction.