Who is popular today?

THE EDITOR: Even leaders need guidance, comforting and motivating. The national psyche is polluted with complaints of offices that we should relieve the republic of but we are drastically short on replacements.
The President should quit. The Prime Minister must go. The Opposition Leader should resign. The Attorney General should be fired. We don’t need a Commissioner of Police. Even SEA and the Concordat must go. Scrap the commission of enquiry into the Paria tragedy. Away with stagnation and sickness. Then what?
No matter what the suffering, only the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder are agonising. Yes, the poor must “bat in dey crease.” Going down the wicket to protest can result in being “tear-gassed” or getting kicked to the head.
The abundant philosophical messages aired when we celebrate anniversaries are sometimes just words. Thank you, Leroy Calliste (Mighty Stalin) for the encouragement that “better days are coming,” which I am yet to see and like. Ole Black Joe my head is bending low.
To the President of this once vibrant republic, your silence is deafening and your inaction provocative. Share your wisdom in law so that the justice system can purge itself of the confusion, uncertainty, division and denials to the poor.
From your window you can see the morass the republic is in: the elderly hobbling around looking for a safe zone; the working population expensed out while angry children chase each other with weapons. The “better” that spouses teamed to enjoy are now disappearing with batter.
Doctors watch their patients go penniless to the grave. Criminal elements mastering the art of evasion and becoming untouchables and the price gougers dictating the cost of living. Right under your nose ministers are offering half-baked services as they desperately and anxiously queue up to qualify for the lucrative pension.
The Prime Minister messaged “have faith.” With the institution of family visibly crumbling and our chronic need for water, food, shelter, roads and electricity not met it is hard to have faith in the unseen.
As the society collapses in slow motion, I am detecting hopelessness in the chorus of appeal to each “self” to be our brother’s keeper. There is an uneasy hush in the Government’s lack of urgency and original ideas. Its agents have lost purpose, are out of control and appear uncaring.
The Government has unknowingly taken the population to the brink and now relies on our resilience: patience, kindness, temperance, humility and sincerity to avert paradise lost.
The Opposition Leader in support suggested “forgiveness,” hopefully not as a one-off but, in the magnitude of the “good book,” 70 times seven.
Two neighbours sat next to each other in church, exchanged the sign of peace, absorbed the same message from the sermon and went home and continued their quarrel, a land dispute and name-calling. When one was called away the other wept bitterly, having missed the opportunity to extend the olive branch.
Made in the image and likeness of the One, it is vain not to honour and cherish names.

LENNOX FRANCIS

via e-mail
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