Dr David Bratt
One morning recently he pulled out of his driveway, got out to close the gate and noticed that a neighbour's car had turned the corner some 80 yards away. He moved the car aside and down she came, accelerating furiously in the narrow side road and drove straight past with not a wave, smile, thanks or glimpse of recognition.
She came off the plane, two weeks in Europe, “everyone there is so friendly”, she said. "Everyone says 'hullo'; everyone smiles, people are polite, nice, want to show you their country, proud of it. I relaxed so much. I really hadn't realised how uptight I was.
"And then I came back to my country, came off the plane and the fear started back."
Then there is Ann, who has worked as a maid all her life, who took her first trip out of Trinidad to an all inclusive in Santo Domingo and returned shaking her head at how well she was treated. How people were so pleasant, polite and went out of their way to be helpful. Every morning at breakfast the waiter approached their family group smiling, saying "Hola". Of the bus driver warning them to be careful! Of returning to T&T and being shocked at the sourness they encountered at Piarco, the dirty, broken down roads, the aggressive out-of-control driving and the lack of police presence. "Is like a Wild West, Doc!"
At a personal level, Trinis are trying to improve. At a general level, at a political level nobody is in charge, there is no direction, the country drifts, nobody knows what the next day will bring. There are people dying all over the country. One minute you're in your car quiet, quiet, the next a bullet in your head from two little boys shooting at each other across the road.
Everywhere you go in T&T it's the same. Some say it's worse in the North and unbearable in the Diego Martin valley. Some say country people still nice. But the ugliness. The sourness. The anger. So many aggressive, confused people. People have lost their mojo. Where have all the friendly Trinidadians gone?
You go to the beach and some idiot comes along driving his over-powered SUV on the sand. As Helen Drayton so aptly observed, Maracas is being destroyed by the corporate ads and hustlers trying to get you to hire chairs. Same thing, corporate or pimp, hustling their product in your face.
I do not feel safe. Is that the reason for the aggressiveness? No one feels safe. I hear this all the time in my practice. In the background is the crime, the drugs, above all, the lack of leadership?
A lost leader of the Opposition, living in a fantasy castle, giving advice to Guyana? A bombastic PM so arrogant that he feels he can get away with saying that his political party is better organised than the Government? Professional organisations, including my own, that are useless and stand for nothing. Religious leaders silent on morality and ethics. Have faith and pray? A trade union leader full of frothy fury incapable of defending his organisation (is that deliberate?) and a whiny business sector busily congratulating each other as they suck up to that same incompetent government trough.
These are our leaders?
On the other hand, hear a foreigner who landed in T&T on a Tuesday night. She got her apartment's A/C fixed within an hour the following morning by two pleasant, efficient technicians and her leaking faucet that afternoon by the plumber with no hassle. The next day, it took her 20 minutes to renew her driver's licence at the St James office.
During that same 24-hour period, there were five murders.
At times I feel like the Italian PM of Piedmont, Massimo d'Azeglio, who, said in 1849: "The people of Italy are twenty per cent stupid, rascally and bold, eighty per cent stupid, honest and timid, and such a people has the Government it deserves."