PAOLO KERNAHAN
I'VE BEEN thinking lately about TT's crushing societal malaise - crime, general lawlessness, economic paralysis, low productivity, social inequality and rampant divisiveness.
Recently, I was nearly forced into a highway guardrail in a deliberate act of rage by a man seemingly angered that I wasn't driving fast enough.
This incident got me chewing on what made us who we are - 24/7 boiling rage, a nation that's stuck, unable to prevail as a unified people and numb to record-breaking murders.
Then it struck me: our national watchwords, discipline, production and tolerance - we're the polar opposite of that ethos. We're mostly indisciplined, as evidenced at the lower end by bad parking, littering, absenteeism, etc, and at the upper end by widespread corruption and malfeasance and incompetence in public office.
In both the public and private sectors, productivity scarcely produces a pulse. Trinis will find any excuse either not to go to work or not to do much of it when on the job. Consequently, everything takes longer than it should and almost nothing works.
And tolerance? While we may have more religious grace than most other countries, we make up for that with deep-seated racial mistrust and naked racial aggression.
So how did we stray so far from the founding principles of this nation? Well, that requires an honest assessment of the long shadow of Eric Williams, a man more lionised than analysed.
Speaking critically of the legacy of Williams, the so-called "father" of the nation, is heresy. The average Trini is loath to interrogate the true impacts of Williams's politics.
Discipline. Production. Tolerance. The watchwords and ethos espoused by a man whose vision for an independent, prosperous, multicultural, multi-ethnic society never translated into policies that might manifest these aspirations. No surprise there, as politics always trumps policy. Power must precede purpose.
The scholarly Williams envisioned a Caribbean force liberated from the yoke of colonialism. It would be powered by educated people with horizons limited only by intellect, character and determination.
"The future of the nation is in our children's school bags," said the Oxford alumnus. What is the reality today, though?
It's estimated that as much as 30 per cent of secondary school students, most of them boys, drop out of the system. Beyond the dropouts are those who don't graduate but just leave, having learned little to prepare them for life.
The PNM boasts of its "free" education, but no one wants to audit the performance of the system. Broadly speaking, conscientious and skilled teachers are frustrated by a lack of resources and abysmal administration.
These and other factors are responsible for the vast numbers of unprepared, maladjusted young adults just hanging around the place.
Academic credentials (or lack thereof) aside, this country is inundated with people who wear ignorance like a crown and wield their sense of entitlement like a burnished sceptre. In our public ser
