Wesley Gibbings
I can’t believe it is already two years plus since I broke the sad news here that in politics, economics, and general governance, there is no Santa.
I had surmised then that the lethargy resulting from a surfeit of goodies over time had the potential to numb judgment, to encourage the pursuit of mystical reward, and to recognise a miracle when there was in fact only contrived illusion.
There is no wand to wave away turbulent energy markets, no fixed deck to return civility, no magic coin to toss and make the violence go away—however shallow the burrows of causality are made to appear.
So it has come to pass since then that fate has, again and again, failed to deliver reality however, much fantasy persists as a joint enterprise.
The agony of Point-a-Pierre and Greenvale and the Cedros port testifies to the shattering of myth as much as the silver tassels along Sackville Street portend caution. There is no way to press release or speech away meaningful resolve.
Through it all, we still wish and we hope that the salvation that comes from wizardry and delivered by either chariot or sleigh or flashing, blue light would somehow come to pass—minus the blood and sweat and tears of deliberate private, collective and public endeavour.
That remarkable young talent, Gerelle Forbes, had cause to remind us from the stage of a Facebook page on Monday of the requirement of being responsible both for our own affairs and of those to come. The late, great Lloyd Best had spoken of national unresponsibility—a population devoid of a sense of being accountable to anyone or for anything.
Instead, the resort to dreaming serves as anodyne for a broken promise and failed potential. Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Gary! Now, Kamla! Now, Keith! Now, Colm! Now, Franklin!
Yet no one stirs, not even a mouse or rat, as our stockings hang emptily at the chimney for Saint Somebody to soon appear. So many years on, we are still in this deep and dank.
Last week, journalists met Sensei Marva John-Logan of Enterprise under the banner of a TTPBA workshop on human interest reporting. There are tears involved. There are sleepless nights as her martial arts dojo intervenes for change in a troubled community.
Though there are prayers and meditations, there is no conjuring up of sudden magic. Nobody expects a flying chariot to parachute change onto troubled soil.
That’s why, in all of this, I bring no lament of hopelessness. For on the horizon stands in waiting for a generation of creators and producers and doers. We see them every day, yet fail to notice them. One holds a guitar in his hands right next to me.
I watch them standing by, passing us on the street and generally going about their business—against the odds conjured by past (failed) generations. Our dreams are their visions—not binary or analogue, but in digital dimensions. I hear it in the music they make, the rhymes they compose, the images they create.
They are in the pan yards, on the stage, and in the galleries. But also in the paddy wagons and sprawled against the bonnets on the highway. Teens, twenty and thirty-somethings. Against the odds. No room at the inns of leadership. Clawing for space even in the face of abundant vacancy. What “golden age”? What “legacy” indeed?
Yet, the sky remains relatively intact, though the oceans churn and the earth rumbles. In the debris of our distress, we lay claim to a future—or something along those lines.
Yet, my son says what the young fear the most is our fear of them. Sensei Marva spoke to us of fear and hope and balancing expectations against cruel reality. She knows that even without magic, promises can be fulfilled and dreams become reality. There is no Santa to deliver any of it. They are there to be claimed.