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By Raffique Shah
July 10, 2024
What bothers me is that I woke up from a deep night’s sleep, scanned the morning TV, switched to the international news and saw that a new British Prime Minister had moved into 10 Downing Street, whose name I didn’t even know. I had no idea how his Labour Party had won the election and what worried me most was that I didn’t care. The fact that there had been a change of government for most of this year should have had an impact on the people, even if not directly on us in little Trinidad and Tobago, meant nothing to me.
It’s all part of aging, of course. Besides being the victim of a disease that has no cure, crime has become a staple of my life; I imagine it is the same for most people in this country and many like us around the world. Once you follow current events, whether local, regional or international, electronically, in print or, worst of all, on social media, you are bombarded with the death tolls from murders and wars, and more.
To escape the bloodiness of crime, many of my lifelong friends have told me that they simply turn off the TV and radio and barely read the newspapers – that’s how they escape the real world and the huge problem of crime. Mind you, as old men, we all hope and pray that we won’t appear on the list of criminal statistics because they kill the elderly so frequently these days.
Now let’s take this a step further. My generation and those before and after had common-sense solutions that may have helped alleviate crime at the time and may still work today. But they don’t. If my fellow generations had contributed substantive “solutions” to crime, perhaps this country wouldn’t be experiencing the mass murder that has reached crisis proportions today.
These three generations, born between 1920 and 1970, will hold all the key positions in the fight against crime. We—myself included—will lead many of the social programs that might curb crime. We will also lead the agencies that fight crime (yes, Randolph Burroughs is only ten years older than I am), the education system, and be held accountable for any success or failure and the reasons for it.
In conclusion, if Trinidad and Tobago was in trouble back in the days of World War I, then we all bear some responsibility for its present state. Note that this is not personal responsibility: I am not blamed because those who are my age or a little older have played a role in training young people who have invariably become model citizens or, at worst, part of the mass of people who live off the land.
In the generation after me, we saw engineers who helped transition the economy from an oil economy to a gas economy, doctors who helped maintain the health care system, innovators, teachers who continue to train future great minds, and people who built America into what it is today. We shaped the denominational schools into the elite schools they are today. Sadly, everything went wrong after that. Well, not everything, but it did go a lot wrong.
So, who is the murderer?
Our grandchildren are top guns, terrorizing their own families, and training the young men in their families to work in all levels of the criminal industry. Believe me, it is an industry, a very fast growing industry, and we hope to see this growth elsewhere. Crime is like a well oiled, well maintained machine.
I almost forgot to mention the criminal godfathers, mostly of my generation or older, who inserted their machinations into the highest echelons of politics and industry, built their empires, politicians lived off of them, siphoned off millions, nay, billions, tens of billions and more from the treasury in the years after independence, while our people held the purse strings of the treasury, owned the contractors, shared the contracts…you get my drift.
It was they who devised the various nationwide schemes which provided not an organised labour force but organised gangsterism, providing avenues for loyal party hacks and even grass-roots supporters to reap the spoils.
These plots, and all the other crimes perpetrated by gangsters masquerading as ministers, contractors, even priests and soldiers, are fanning the flames that threaten to consume us. I am not angry, I am sad and frustrated. My country needs good citizens, and here I stand, with little to no power to help.
I felt defeated.
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