martingeorge4law@hotmail.com

Eyes wide shut

With a murder toll of around 330 to date in mid-August of 2008, it is quite likely that we will cross 450 murders by the end of the year.

Now, this is not to lament, or complain, or bemoan the high numbers, or to blame the police or Ministry of National Security for the spiralling crime rate.

This is about the fact that as a nation, we all seem to be asleep at the wheel with eyes wide shut.

We have gone past and evolved way beyond being outraged, shocked or disturbed by the news reports and the gory headlines.

We have matured as a people beyond blaming our politicians and leaders for the state of the nation. We are too civilised for that.

Afraid to complain

Too many of us are tied to positions where we are dependent on the political directorate of the day to speak up or to say our piece on any issue, lest it be misconstrued as criticism and we be marginalised or demonised for so doing.

So we all continue the merry game of pretence, each going about his own way with eyes wide shut.

We observe kidnappings and just close our doors tighter, or put more locks on our gates and hope and pray that it will never come our way.

We quietly take out our kidnap insurance and install GPS body trackers under the skin for ourselves and our children.

We just try to quietly keep making our money, to stash away in Miami or Fort Lauderdale, pretending that the volcano is not bubbling, boiling, waiting to explode beneath our feet.

We turn a blind eye to the horrendous traffic jams and clogged transportation arteries on our nation’s highways and roadways.

We are afraid to even complain or criticise any more for fear that the Minister of Works will have us up in the press the next morning with one of his usual diatribes in defence of the indefensible and attacking the messenger, while losing complete sight of the message.

So we remain stuck behind the wheel snarled in traffic, going nowhere fast, with eyes wide shut.

We then fool ourselves with the false hope and consolation that the rapid rail will solve these problems, when in fact it is quite likely that the majority of people who currently use their cars to go to work, school, play, socialise or shop, would not lightly give up the comfort and convenience of their own cars and being able to drive directly to and from their destinations in favour of hopping on the light rail at City Gate or Arima.

Part of the problem with the proposed light rapid rail system is that it does not appear to have a branching network, but seems to be merely a main line North-South, East-West type of arrangement.

Had there been a full-fledged network, whether above ground or underground, with branches snaking out to St Ann’s, Cascade, Maraval, Point Fortin, Cedros, Carenage, Diego Martin, Caroni, Kelly Village and all other small towns, communities and villages, then it would be a whole lot more attractive to commuters, because it would have presented the possibility of hopping on to the network at any point and getting to practically any other point of Trinidad, on the same rapid rail network.

Nowhere fast

What is also likely to happen is that the maxis that do a straight North-South run and East-West run may well find themselves largely put out of business. These drivers may very well turn to small taxis or PH to “make a hustle,” thus clogging and congesting the roads with even more vehicles and defeating one of the stated purposes of the rapid rail.

We can see these things; we can assess these things, yet we still approach this multi-billion-dollar investment ignoring these concerns and rushing headlong into it with eyes wide shut.

Our nation’s health institutions are failing our citizens on a daily basis and the health minister was at pains, last week, to try to convince a suspicious and wary population that there is no dengue scare and no reason to panic.

The more he spoke, the more some people became concerned and alarmed, for fear that we may be facing a health crisis in this country with eyes wide shut.

We continue to exist in some sort of a haze and a daze and in an ethereal, surrealistic twilight zone, where truth is fiction and fiction is Gospel truth

Yet, we spend millions of dollars and millions of man hours hunting and pursuing truths that are apparent to us on the face of things, if we would only awaken from our slumber and stop approaching life here in Trinidad and Tobago with eyes wide shut.