After yuh struggle so long
Now yuh battle weary
No time to be weary
The fight is still on
After yuh struggle so long
And yuh battle weary
Is time to be wary
The fight is still on.
-After D Battle, 3 Canal
He tells me he's been diagnosed with, of all things, mercury poisoning. Gary who makes me feel a little less embarrassed to be a Trini. Who eases the sting of Trinidadian/Tobagonian complacency and nonchalance about the fact that our environment is in a state. I desperately want to believe that someone is mistaken. If you live your life with a certain level of awareness then these things don't happen to you.
But knowledge is not enough. It is the ultimate of ironies. The kind of colossal jokes the universe plays on you. To test you. To frustrate you. To make sure you're still paying attention.
I dig deep, looking frantically around in my brain for something sensible to say. Something that will ease what I can only imagine is his considerable anguish. Men try to hide their anguish, they do. I imagine it is in there with all the facts and the figures. All the information that we chose to ignore. I ask him how he feels and he smiles, there are tears in his eyes and I want to bawl myself. He does the man thing and gets himself together. I want to weep for all those who will not deal with their lifestyle diseases so well. Who can be philosophical and self-deprecating and funny when you are angry and embarrassed and terribly saddened by their news. No one deserves sickness. No matter how good or bad a life they've led. No Trinidadian/Tobagonian deserves to suffer the consequences of unregulated industries. Well except apparently the one called noise.
It's funny really. That the EMA only seems to be capable of seeing the effluents of our cultural industries as pollutants worthy of the full brunt of the law. Meanwhile the effluents and wastes from the finite resources judged as valuable to the haves who already have too much go unchecked. No quarry boss will get arrested when there are landslides on the Northern Range. No alcohol manufacturers spend and hour in jail when the children in the Beetham break out in inexplicable skin sores. The most likely way for someone to get mercury poisoning is from fish. Who regulates the effluents being pumped into our waters? Who monitors the impact that these heavy gas-based industries have on us every day?
There will be a time when this will no longer read like alarmist fiction. And I guess that time is now for Gary. And I guess if he was that kind of person he would say, Trinidad I told you so. Trinidad take a bow for not taking responsibility for your actions. I imagine he is more measured than that. And it's only because I have ovaries I feel this extreme outrage, this desire to shake people awake. Gary still has the patience and faith in humanity to believe that another meeting or another conference will yield answers. When all I want to do is slap oil company executives silly with the dead fish that so frequently wash up on the shores that are kissed by the Gulf of Paria. This gulf that like a diseased lover leaves you with sores to remind you of her love.
He mentions memory loss several times. And I'm not sure he repeats it because he has forgotten that he's said it before or because we are nothing without our memories. He is his usually factual self as the lists the many possible impacts and implications. I wonder how many other people in this country have these symptoms without knowing what the hell is going on with them. Later I consult with the Wikipe-dia oracle and find out what Gary has been trying to tell us for the past 15 years, that human activities like steel production, mercury production for batteries and biomass burning cause seriously negative impacts on human beings. Like mercury poisoning.
Activists' eyes sometimes shine with that zealot fervour. Convinced that you can make a difference you blunder through, go against friends and family. Become a laughing stock. Until some person cooler than you makes it okay to be environmentally conscious, more than likely so they can turn a profit. In a society that is still very much about appearances, it remains to be seen whether this new appearance of environmental consciousness is coming from a point of sincerity or is simply just another mas some people want to play.