Watch watch watch
Watch the buildings get taller
While while while
While the people get smaller
Your vision number perfect
But it got no soul
If yuh had a mirror to gaze your mould,
All you'd see is iron oil steel and concrete cold,
While you just sit back and watch that concrete grow
Plant the roots
Sink them deep into mother earth
Water them with pollution and corruption
Then sit back and watch that concrete grow
-Concrete Grow,
Kin Sound System
There's a cartoon sketch I remember from the days when I was addicted to Sesame Street, before it was all politically correct and no-one had seen Snuffleupagus yet and Mr Hooper was still alive. It's about a town called Sniddler's Gulch which is being terrorised by a dude called Cowboy X. Basically Cowboy X was an ignorant kind of fellar who liked to go about stamping the letter X all over property and even on the goodly residents of the Gulch.
Well anyway, one day a little boy suggests that the people ask Cowboy X to stop marking up their town with big Xs. And of course when Cowboy X rolls into town and they ask him he says sure. And then he goes and changes his name to Cowboy O and the narrator concludes that the people of Sniddler's Gulch lived happily ever after with Cowboy O be-cause they really weren't very smart. I've been thinking about Cowboy X and his seamless transition to Cowboy O as the echo of bulldozers mix with the angry words of farmers. And I wonder if we're really not that smart either. This is the change we voted for. This is the change we wanted. Yes we voted against a smelter on the apex of an aquifer on Foodcrop Road in Chatham. We voted against 800 acres of forest and lake and recreation and farm land cleared for an industrial estate. We voted against a $3 billion food import bill.
For you to come and bulldoze growing food. You are so very different from those people whose blind vision was leading us to big buildings and small people. You are so different, flying off to Brazil in your $2.2 million chartered flight. You are so different with your some animals are more equal than others rhetoric. This is the change we voted for and like the people of Sniddler's Gulch we will live happily ever after because we're really not smart enough to get a government that actually cares about the people who ensure that they get into power. It is barbarism that is shocking even for politicians. I remember my grandmother used to say you shouldn't throw away bread. It's a sin against humanity and against yourself to be so thoughtless with something so essential to our existence. It's like cursing yourself, really, to destroy food.
So here comes the HDC to curse us all. And I'm superstitious like that. Because Mother Earth is like the abused woman who takes and takes and takes and then when she can't take it anymore she goes on a rampage and kills the abusive husband. How many generations of Trinidad children are now saddled with the bad karma of destroyed food? What you don't want will leave you. What you reject will leave you one of these good days. And then, well, we might start to eat oil and concrete. We will munch on the houses that we built without trees, without space for community gardens. We will feast on the spoils of our waste and there will be many many politicians gathered like "cobos" on the festering corpse of our agricultural legacy. They will pick at it and blame each other for its demise. They will enjoy the posturing and the belated apologies. They will make many headlines blaming each other.
And the people of T&T, like the people of Sniddler's Gulch, will take and take and be happy with the lies, or rather the restructuring of the truth. Because we are so accustomed to it now. In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty. In the abundance of wealth you have imps in suits who think that it's okay to go and bulldoze growing food. If I were a farmer the only compensation I would be willing to accept after last weekend's barbaric destruction would be to see Jearlean John and the other HDC staff replanting the acres of food they so callously destroyed.
To teach them a little humility. To teach them the value of growing food. Maybe then they would think twice about bulldozing it next time. I wonder how the people who drove the bulldozers over that food can sleep at night. How they can take money to do a thing that is a far worse crime than what so many young men spend time in prison for these days. I hope that the people of T&T are a little smarter than the people of Sniddler's Gulch and demand the change they voted for instead of this back side of the same blasted khaki pants.