GOD SOLVES EVERYTHING

Kevin Baldeosingh

According to Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Wayne Dick, God helped police investigators arrest and charge a suspect in the Shannon Banfield murder case.

Now you might ask why God didn’t stop Ms Banfield from being killed in the first place, hence saving the T&T Police Service the time and trouble and embarrassment of a high-profile investigation. But anyone who asks such a question only proves that they don’t understand that God moves in mysterious ways His miracles to perform.

And, in any case, Ag Deputy Dick in a press conference a few weeks ago offered a reason for God’s ways, since Dick noted that the investigation had been carried out under Dick’s “astute leadership,” hence proving that God approves of this approach to policing. And I think most readers will agree that this is generally how police officers in T&T perform their duties.

That is also why the Inter-Religious Organisation (IRO) arranges days of prayer several times a year in order to fight crime. It is true that these prayer days have not succeeded in reducing crime, but that only proves that we need more days with more people praying.

It’s like licks for small children. Many people, including National Security Minister Edmund Dillon, argue that you can prevent children becoming criminals by beating them in home and in school. And Mr Dillon, as he revealed during the last general election campaign, grew up in a God-fearing PNM household, which obviously is different from a merely PNM household, since most PNM households are located in high-crime areas.

But you might ask, if licks prevents criminality, how come nearly all criminals got licks when they were small? But this only shows that they either weren’t beaten enough or beaten hard enough. After all, it’s no use beating a child in such a way that you only get them vex. You have to beat them so hard that you put the fear of God in them, which is why Minister Dillon is a National Security Minister on whose watch the number of murders has increased, since his Ministerial colleague Education Minister Anthony Garcia has rejected re-instituting corporal punishment in schools.

Since God in the Bible says spare the rod spoil the child, it is clearly against God’s will to not beat children, which is why hunter-gatherers who don’t know God’s word don’t do so. It is also against God’s will that children not be executed for cursing their parents and, if the government would only do what God says, this will eradicate both crime and children who refuse to eat their peas. Unfortunately, T&T is a place where many people pay lip service to God but balk at obeying His commands, and this is no doubt why this country is plagued with so many ills.

It’s not only that more people need to pray, but they need to be more sincere in their prayers. Last year, a young woman was abducted by a taxi-driver and, according to news reports, because she and her parents prayed, her abductor dropped her off. “What if we hadn’t prayed?” her father asked, not asking why God didn’t answer the prayers of other women who had been abducted and raped or killed, because such a question would be blasphemous.

Obviously, though, God only answers the prayers of sincere people, which shows that, when a person who prays for their life to be spared but is still murdered or killed in an earthquake, this proves that they didn’t really mean it. As for small children who get battered to death, God doesn’t intervene due to their fathers or grandfathers or great-great-great-grandfathers having sinned. Because that is how men are. This also proves that young women never lie about being abducted because, if they do so it’s usually to hide some relationship their parents don’t approve of, which would be a sin and God punishes sinful people by not giving them His divine protection.

Luckily, there are always more women than men in church and that is why women constitute just 10 per cent of all murder victims. The correlation is clear. But, as public reaction time and time again has demonstrated, the death of one woman is ten times as tragic as the death of one man. Indeed, if the dead man is poor and young and black, the same public is either indifferent or, more often, approving. Because God don’t sleep.

That divine insomnia proves that, if God lets 400 people in T&T get killed every year, it’s only to show that we need to worship Him more, with tithes.

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• Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a Caribbean history textbook.