Curiously, some people habitually deliver their most profound pronouncements when the balance of their mind is disturbed. A group of such handicapped individuals has lately been suggesting this country’s more pressing problems are to be blamed on the age of its parliamentary representatives. The current prime minister, who is 58 years old, is ten years younger than his immediate predecessor Kenny Anthony, who first took office in 1997 when he was 46; his immediate predecessor was then 56.
It is hardly surprising that the inadvertent ageists earlier cited are yet to declare how old is too old for office or how old is young. Nevertheless they seem self-convinced that if voters placed greater emphasis on a candidate’s age, and less on his or her education, their police records and their work history, our government over the years would’ve been less corrupt, our country less poor, our citizens less depressed about our present and future.
I offer the small comfort that in Saint Lucia any citizen not under 21 years of age is eligible to offer his services to the public. He or she is also welcome to participate every five years in an electoral race, the outcome of which is determined by citizens from age 18!
I might also remind readers we are a people that believe wealth, power and status can be acquired through prayer and incantations. We cannot say for certain how this works but then that has never prevented us from spending the midnight hours in unlit graveyards, calling on the spirits to do unto our fast asleep seemingly better off neighbor the evil that men cannot do. We willingly hand over scarce money to perfect strangers whom we believe can tell us more about ourselves than we know, the names of individuals who may be standing between us and success, and who may be responsible for our killer headaches that seem always to strike after two straight nights of partying.
We’ve been known to rape innocent children, ostensibly for virgin blood we consider magical. We appear on TV to talk about the supernatural powers of beautiful sweet-talking ladies of the night who had one foot human and the other like a cow’s. Not so long ago a well-loved priest offered himself to be interviewed on television about his latest book on the spirit world, exorcism and his faith in God. When a viewer called to ask where boloms come from, the priest, as casually as he might have spoken the first line of the Lord’s prayer, said: “Boloms are human fetuses.”
The caller was evidently satisfied with the received short answer. More information on the subject may be obtained from our kwéyòl dictionaries, wherein bolom is defined as “a miniature man, roughly two feet tall, brought into being on a Good Friday to do the evil bidding of his summoner.” Despite extensive research I could find no information about what boloms eat, what they do when not carrying out their summoner’s evil bidding, whether they have sex and with whom. Someone assured me that at least two local politicians house boloms (conceivably in their basements or in miniature underground bunkers!).
I wonder from time to time how a people with such strongly held primitive beliefs as hinted above can be expected to make useful decisions based on the realities of modern-day living. A significant portion of our number remain convinced that natural disasters are the price we pay for engaging in unblessed sex and other excesses in defiance of God’s laws, and therefore consider it pointless to waste money battening down against the unstoppable. Why waste time clearing trash-laden drains and river ways? Regardless of whether we heed the official warnings, God alone will decide whether we survive his wrath.
I am at this point reminded of Thomas Jefferson, who in a letter to Charles Yancey opined: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Even as some of us theorize on Facebook about remedies for what’s killing our country, it is not unusual to hear someone talking about “a boy sent to do a man’s job.” As recently as two months ago, this was how one parliamentarian described a fellow MP. Similar scorn was heaped on the head of Stephenson King when despite never having attended university he was this country’s prime minister.
The line was a throwback from the heyday of George Odlum, perhaps the first Saint Lucian to acquire an Oxford education. I recall an occasion when he howled from the steps of the Castries market that he more than anyone else was qualified to replace John Compton as leader of government since he alone held university degrees in economics and English literature. At the time Odlum was only a campaigning politician. But he would have his opportunity to prove intellectuals make better leaders than such as Stephenson King whose institutional education ended at high school. So would Kenny Anthony and his lettered chief advisors; so would Vaughan Lewis, described in Anthony’s The Rainbow’s Edge as Saint Lucia’s worst prime minister and more immoral by far than John Compton ever was.
The notion that to have earned a Ph.D was irrefutable proof of the holder’s Midas touch—to the extent that one local politician fabricated his own—took a battering in the years following 1997, which may explain the earlier mentioned prayer for “young people with new ideas.” I, for one, am far more interested in hearing the new ideas, regardless of their origin. So far all the nation has been served are more of the same, both in terms of possible candidates and their repetitious platform deliveries, all of them disconnected from our killer realities.
There is nothing new about our healthcare situation. It stinks. As badly today as it did before St. Jude went up in flames. Victoria Hospital has from way before the 80s been undeserving of its name—albeit that its dedicated personnel continue to perform miracles.
There is no justice in our justice system; it’s been broken for over a century, way before a visitor famously described our prison as “the local black hole of Calcutta.” Unemployment has long been our chief sower of dragons’ teeth. Even in the best days of bananas and in the time of what Compton once described as “fly by night industries,” profitable legal work was a problem. Every prime minister since Compton has acknowledged, not necessarily in the same words, “our work force is not up to doing what is considered menial work everywhere else!”
In short, successive governments have failed us, whether or not in varying degrees. By which I mean to say, a man who robs another of fifty bucks is as much a thief as he who robbed a bank of $38,000. I can imagine the Facebook intellectuals (our over-sensitive politicians, too), thinking: “Okay Mr. Know All, tell us how you would save Saint Lucia.”
Which of course takes us quickly back to the root of the problem: our obeah-voodoo self-destructive mentality. It has been brought to my attention, the latest recipe for disaster circulating the Internet, prescribed by yet another soi-disant intellectual parasite: A national strike. Reminiscent of a time when self-serving unconscionable “best brains of the nation” regularly persuaded banana farmers to engage in no-cut strikes against themselves.
When will we acknowledge “we are all prisoners here of our own device”? Always we’ve imagined it’s someone else alone who can save us, never mind that our perceived saviors created our predicament in the first place, while we looked on like baffled sheep. Or is it that Breen was right when he declared us too lazy to fend for ourselves, too unwilling to accept positive change . . . Too damn parasitic!
