It's you - it's you - it's you I'm talkin' to -
Well, you (it's you) - you (it's you) - you I'm talking to now.
Why do you look so sad and forsaken?
When one door is closed, don't you know other is open?
Would you let the system make you kill your brotherman?
No, Dread, no!
Would you make the system make you kill your brotherman?
No, Dread, no!
Would you make the system get inside your head again?
No, Dread, no!
Well, the biggest man you ever did see was - was just a baby.
-Coming in from the Cold
Bob Marley
In my Babylondon bubble I try to hide away from the news of Trinidad that grows ever more sinister daily. In my Babylondon bubble I focus on the bitterness of the cold. The way I can walk for miles and not break a sweat. The way winter makes your nose wet but your eyes dry and how easy it is to spend your whole time outside only looking down. The way your feet freeze and turn numb if you stand outside too long wearing shoes that are way too tropical for this weather. When it gets cold enough you stop feeling certain things. Homesickness is an easy ailment, fixed with food and the big beautiful leaves of chadon beni you get in the Vietnamese shop. You stop feeling like an alien. Wrapped in your cloaks of cold invisibility where everyone watches with eyes that don't see much more than they want to. Where no one cares if you laugh or cry. You are relieved and disturbed that no one here notices you and you are free to observe and think and be without their judgment.
When you get the science of layering down and you fall in love with a pair of brown knee-high boots you can forget about heat and how it feels to walk around with the sun on your shoulders, with your toes wriggling freely in your favourite Charlotte Street "piper clarks." Heat that forces itself into every pore is a far-off dream when it is cold. But even the cold is not enough to numb me from the image of a little boy and the adult who holds his head in a toilet. And flushes. And thinks that this is okay. And believes that he or she is right. And whose name is protected because he or she is not from some public school. Like the people who continue to protect Akiel Chambers' killer. What a place of cold and calculating violence. This is not abnormal. This is now the norm. The line between licks and abuse is one that gets blurred and we can't quite understand that the violence we teach children to expect is the violence they will learn to inflict.
I wonder how people can be so cold in their hearts. That they can do the things they do to children in Trinidad and not be bothered. Think they can get away with their crimes. Or worse, not see it as a crime at all. I wonder how we can be so cold to not have laws that protect children so that we have to keep being stunned and outraged by the behaviour of people in our communities that are so casually abusive. What coldness has frozen us to the point of numbness in Trinidad that we are incapable of acting until our own children are affected? If one child is at risk all our children are at risk. Why is that so hard to understand? Like my fingers, there is no emotion to ascribe to headlines and conversations. About a child's head being flushed in a toilet. It is too cold here for me to weep. My eyes are too dry and I am not sure if my tears can help anyway.
In the silence of central heating I listen to the news and watch the conversations on the social media networks. Where the nation of armchair revolutionaries have the cyberspace to now occupy. And as T&T's press freedom ratings continue their downward slide, the voices on the social networks grow louder and more bacchanalish and there are few who are coherent enough to do anything but vomit daily bile at our collective powerlessness. We occupy cyberspace well. We are brave and loud and strong and feel things online. I wonder that our outrage remains frozen on the Web. It never melts into the streets. It never prompts us to find ourselves en masse in front of anybody's door-step. It never prompts parents to arm themselves with information. To insist on help being provided if they need it. For the overworked cadre of social workers to demand more training and more staff. For teachers to demand child protection training. What a cold place for our children. What a cold and terrible time for them. To live in a society so paralysed by keeping up appearances that nobody will dare to embarrass the whole place into action.
