I congratulate Therese Baptiste-Cornelis for doing my country proud as an ambassador. I thoroughly enjoyed her keynote address on cultural diversity. For those of us who live here and still happen to possess a fair deal of open-mindedness, the Web address on which our ambassador's address can be heard in its entirety (35 minutes) is http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=R9EQqNZjPHI. I think that in order to fully assess the content of what Baptiste-Cornelis is saying, one must look and listen to her entire address. Far too often we comment on issues based on popular opinion and hearsay. It is fitting, in the spirit of the multiculturalism about which Baptiste-Cornelis spoke so endearingly, to end by leaving you with the wisdom of that very culture. Sugar Aloes, in his calypso called De Cause of de Problem, could not have described us better as a society when he sang:
When we see a brother climbing up de ladder,
We pullin' him off before he get on.
When we see a sister slip an' tumble in de gutter,
With a blazing tongue we cryin' she down;
So its ah bring-down mentality, the pull-down philosophy,
Dat is de root and de source of de cancer dat really killin' we!
Everybody wants de opportunity to live like a king,
But dey never like to see dey neighbour living up doing de same ting,
So de tuggin and de pullin' every day will forever be,
Until we can free ourselves from this pull-down mentality!"
Steve Smith
Via e-mail