My last column was to end differently. I wasn’t brave, and let Minister Cuffie’s public servant secretary divert me. I’m going to try to finish.

In writing about forging one nation out of this “small but overwhelming with worth” place, where different bodies jostle together, I’ve often held up the idea of “boundless faith.”

A Guyanese colleague completed suicide year-end. I’ve told friends how enabling her action has proven in my scuffles with mid-life and meaning. They’ve blinked; the conversation has continued. I found myself in the middle of a Carnival fete, feet moving to Dil-E-Nadan, fingers messaging a psychiatrist friend how much, unbearable pain I was in. Call me tomorrow, I begged. I rose at 6am, went on live TV. No call came—that day or the next.

It’s not that folks like Zenita don’t ask for help, I shared on Facebook. When we do, people don’t take us seriously. Or themselves are too wounded to be of use. My post generated lots of likes. Zero calls.

Recent headlines here linked national mental health to legion gun violence. I’d imagined another violence: the daily ways we don’t “get through”, the minister’s secretary hangs up, simple things that ought to be in place aren’t, a gendered slight happens, someone is thoughtless. Structural violence permeates our colonial-heritage institutions designed to violate natural justice and ideologies to make indignity seem normal and tolerable. Add to that a loss of certainty in faith and gender that once ordered our world, global economic instability, climate change, growing state weakness in the face of all this, wanton, cyclical corruption of officials, and the new season of disappointment, 21 weeks after the election, as it dawns that we are back on the same political treadmill, just a different brand.

Perhaps our most urgent problems aren’t crime, oil prices, meaningless curriculum, or parenting; but, more fundamentally, the crisis of each other. A school system designed to make losers of all but a few, an overheated consumer economy and its competitive stratification, the narcosub-economy’s lure of importance and ownership—all misshape our sense of worth. In a natural environment where myriad opportunities exist to stand still and wonder, we are consistently called on to move, and move on from the latest slight or wound. There’s little time, culture or structures to sit, heal, repair. We don’t take others’ distress seriously till they splash it all over the floor or jump up and down like a three-year-old’s tantrum. Even three-year-olds we don’t listen to; we beat them into stuffing their discomfort. Vulnerability is shameful. Bullying toughens you for an unfair world. Cruelty to nature, animals, children, partners is normal. Sometimes as sexual pleasure.

I sense that my colleague was deeply ashamed of her domestic abuse. I felt no shame in seeking help, however. But everyone—save two friends, in New York and Barbados—assumed I was resiliently coping. We’ve all learned that resilience, to push violence out of consciousness, away from where it feels painful, with picong or self-mockery, Carnival or rum—cultural implements forged to wash away all the unlovely.

Before my searing middle class all-inclusive-fete rage, I’d always remarked about people who stand in line at the bank behind you or ride in the maxi seat next to yours, normel-normel, and go home to kill their wives, children and selves. Their deep sense that the taking of life is both an act of despair and a way to punish everyone who never listened or heard or noticed, lash back against every injustice or hurt. The property disputes resolved by burning down the house.

I do not think these people had never asked for help.

Last January I noted here how we just don’t have tools to manage a complex world of relationships. Or don’t know that we have them. All we know how to do is tap. Hang. Cut tail. Bully. Chop. Shoot.

Perhaps we do have the tools. And they are simple. Just like we’re taught to compete at every turn, we can all learn to care, create emotionally intelligent communities who know how to listen, develop common skills at healing. Prioritise clinical skill over book sense and compliance in training care professionals. Recognise how every relationship holds the power to heal or harm. That many effective models exist for communities of care, and it’s everyday loving relationships where we grow and heal more powerfully than clinical ones. How men can learn to be accountable in intimacy.

We can centre the practice of tenderness and regard. But we must understand how the social structures we’ve inherited do exactly the opposite, and cling less eagerly to their rituals.

• This column, my 50th, marks a milestone in a two-year run. I want to celebrate the Guardian’s boldness in continuing to host it. I hope my unconventional words about citizenship, governance, family, consumer rights, masculinity, sexuality—and how hard it is to love have helped show why justice matters, that agency is possible, and the beauty in honesty. Some things writing won’t heal. I call us all to tend to those. I am off to tend to mine.

It was only this past decade, in a moment of sheer joy, driving listening to a now defunct calypso station, I discovered Sparrow’s calypso Lulu, recorded around 1959. Its message resonates so powerfully, I chose a couplet from it as the epigraph for my first book.

"Come lewwe go, Lulu, is a long time I watching you," the Birdie entreats her, "Have no fear. The bachy is there. No one will interfere."

"Ah fraid you go make a calypso on me" is Lulu’s hesitation.

I’m so bored with being another warbling lemming going up the hill to find the hammer in the sing-a-long chorus that every David Rudder performance has degenerated into. I roll my eyes when during Sparrow’s now sit-down performances the old men shout out over the rum names or lines of well-worn standards they urge his millionth lacklustre delivery of. I must admit, though, watching Jayron Remy ("DJ Rawkus") next to me in the sweaty crowd singing every word at Rudder’s last major Savannah concert made my pores raise contemplating David’s influence across generations. But the concerts I want to attend would discover underexplored corners of these masters’ work, underrated gems, work that died in the studio, oral histories of the songs and their characters, imaginative concert versions of the recordings.

Yes, I’ve joined the 2016 edition of the debates, the hopelessness, the hand-wringing over the state and future of "de art form" and "de festival." The praise God for the PNM and Dr Rowley litanies in Skinner Park, in between the young women wailing the headtie-holding dirges they bought from writers who imagine no other role for them. The monstrous costumes being dragged across the stage like funereal tadjahs. Ones crowned king and queen few will remember or distinguish. One "de judges" ranked third-place my friend home from London said people were talking about in every maxi he got into, and will into history. I’ve listened to Tony Hall’s logic that Carnival shows drag on formlessly like an Orisha feast or Kali puja.

Forget soca lyrics: I’ve contemplated the dead-end of the Carnival fete. The unwarranted deafening volume in schoolyards, the unintelligible singing, the lightbulb-screwing, the instructions what to do with your hands I refuse to follow, the rote exercises like refereeing competitions among different sections of the audience, even the four decades-old "somebody missing" geographic roll call that surprisingly still pops up. The unbearably inane and criminally lazy broadcast commentary. Mark Lyndersay’s comment that government prize money has been the most ruinous force in Carnival’s development in 20 years. I wonder if it isn’t our obsession with competition and judgment itself that has deformed things, made everything into contests we entrust to questionably qualified panels we run to law courts to protest. Maybe the CJ will announce a Carnival court in next year’s law term address. I wonder, more seriously, whether some sort of Carnival version of a west Port-of-Spain traffic plan isn’t needed—a sweeping and heavy-handed new framework for the core infrastructure of Carnival to override the petty protests that prevent solutions, create a new landscape of opportunities and problems for imagination and enterprise to explore. I am humbled, in my armchair musings, that far more incisive and experienced ideas than mine are available to state bureaucrats serious about Carnival reform.

So I return to Lulu. Her invocation was really about the new lease on life for this column, where I thought I was writing about bodies and nation, but what I have actually been trying to do is make calypsoes. On everything. And my reflection on the essential importance of that function in our print media.

A friend I left out of my last column about our crisis of each other felt indicted. So I thought I would put her in here. Because what the Lulu epigraph means for me is that all writing, like a good Sparrow calypso, is a form of treachery. That the purpose of writing is the betrayal itself—to make experiences and people close to you into characters in a tale worth telling because of something they said or did.

I once thought poems or calypsoes or columns required this wrestling between truth and fiction. I’d discovered this resonant line from Marcel Proust while studying André Gide for A-Level French. Gide, Proust and Oscar Wilde were all European homosexuals and literary giants born in the third quarter of the 19th century, who struggled in some way with questions of self-declaration in their writing. Wilde’s led him to be jailed for gross indecency.

After meeting in 1897 with Wilde, just out of Reading Gaol, Gide recalls the Englishman complimenting his work but asking him, "now you must make me a promise…dear, from now on never write ‘I’" and, to further underscore his point, adding "in art there is never a first person." Twenty-five years later, Gide sought the younger Proust’s feedback on new work, and the latter wrote back similarly, "You can tell everything, on condition that you never say ‘I’." Gide went on to win the Nobel literature prize 25 years later.

Come lewwe go, Lulu!

I was taken aback to read the impenetrable ramblings attributed to me in Monday’s paper, following a telephone interview about Trinidad & Tobago’s Universal Periodic Review I did while driving to the airport last week. It underscored how unintelligible discourse about international human rights can often seem, and the pressing need for more bad-manners plaintalk about them like Hazel Brown’s—the focus of Monday’s story.

So I’m delighted to be back in these pages, trying to make sense, with you, of how our many bodies share this one nation, with boundless faith in our common destiny. Let me be playful in meeting a tight deadline, by trying to translate my Monday mishmash.

“We are subject to universal period review by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. I was in the middle of that process and it raises questions of our records against torture, children and women and gender-based violence. It got crazy.”

Translation: Sorry I didn’t notice your Facebook message, colleague. I’ve been crazy. In the middle of the Universal Periodic Review. The same process at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva mentioned in the article on US ambassador Estrada, that Trinidad & Tobago was just subject to. Where the US, among 50-something other states, made peer assessments of our human rights record. Key questions raised during the review were Trinidad & Tobago’s failure to ratify the Convention Against Torture, children’s and women’s rights, particularly gender-based violence.

“He said T&T was congratulated at the Disability Convention for their efforts made and credit for improvement in other sectors. We have to put all that in place. We are doing well and one of our remaining challenges is that we don’t allow our citizens to go international when it comes to human rights,” he said.

Translation: The state was congratulated for ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities last year, and given credit by several states for improvements in other areas where we were seen to be doing well. But we still have to put all of those commitments to human rights into place. And one of our remaining challenges is that we don’t allow our citizens to take cases to international adjudication mechanisms when it comes to human rights violations.

“Robinson said T&T needed to be accountable to a common state of standards. ‘That is human rights. We don’t allow our citizens to go international and we have to make sure our protections at home are strong and issues are raised,’” he said.

Translation: International human rights involves states holding each other accountable to a common set of standards for how people should be treated because they are human. That’s what human rights are. If we don’t allow our citizens to go to international bodies to ensure we are meeting those standards, we have to make sure our protections at home are strong and people have access to redress mechanisms to raise issues.

“He said a lot of our laws were old and there should be a lot of changes in legislation. ‘We passed the Children’s Act in 2012 and we also criminalised children who have sex with each other and want to send them to jail for life. Rights are rights for everybody and not one set of people. Children need to be done in a different way because they can suffer. Gay rights is to be treated as everybody else.”

Translation: When we talk about “gay rights,” we’re talking about gay people asking to be treated like everybody else. (Is the problem there that T&T’s laws are old and need to be changed?) Yes; but the problem is also new laws. When we passed the Children Act in 2012—child protection legislation—we also criminalised children of the same sex touching each other, and want to send them to jail for life. At the same time we de-criminalised the consummation of child marriages. (pause to get my parking ticket and drive into a lucky space) Government’s approach at the review was that some groups are clearly deserving of rights—children, women, and now people with disabilities—because their suffering is legitimate. But the idea of “rights” is that they are for everybody, not just one set of people.

I’m not above creating my own garble without anyone’s help. It’s not too late to correct arithmetic and nationality errors in my February 7, Sunday Guardian column: When “On De Road,” Massive Chandelier & Ronnie McIntosh’s Carnival 1995 tune, set off nationality roll-calls in fetes was two—not four—decades ago. Oscar Wilde was Irish. And André Gide, 15 years Wilde’s junior, was less than two years older than Marcel Proust.

n Kevin Baldeosingh returns in June.

What exactly proved the tipping point for child marriage laws last week?

Provisions (dating back in law to at least 1881) for marrying minors, retained in our current Hindu and Muslim acts, a 2013 United Nations poll revealed are opposed by modern Trinbagonians two to one, including just half of Hindus and Muslims. That’s a smaller number than the same poll showed oppose discrimination against homosexuals. So why did a new PNM government, which hasn’t enacted Equal Opportunity protections for gays the Commission keeps reminding it recommended two years ago, suddenly say it will change the marriage laws? Days after reading a prepared statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council defending not changing laws we admitted in 2012 were human rights issues. It didn’t seem it was the weight of Algeria, Botswana, Chile, Paraguay, Sierra Leone and Slovenia all raising the issue, 86 states that backed two Council resolutions since our 2012 review, a General Assembly resolution that didn’t need a vote, or that ending child marriage is now a UN Sustainable Development Goal.

The Hindu Women’s Organization’s thoughtful child marriage campaign ought to be in a public policy textbook. But it’s been ongoing for years, and never swayed a Cabinet full of Hindus.

Was the only barrier to change a female leader who owed her anointment to a Hindu patriarch? Her legacy instead is a landmark child protection law that, in section 26, makes it unquestionably legal to sexually consummate a marriage to a child of any age. That same leader last week encouraged the current government to be brave on the issue. Her gender minister, who’s made public comments she was instructed to preserve child marriage in law, howled; I thought it was a rare moment of Kamla’s honesty.

Was it that all the work already been done by Brenda Gopeesingh and other Hindu women, or Verna, in her brief year in office, to prime the political space? And the issue just needed to get raised once post-Partnership? Or was it unseen hands of three Bishops girls every current executive decision must live with—the real reason the PNM pushed Ray TimKee off his mayoral ledge.

A scientist is now PM? Fellow geologist Patrick Manning infused faith into governance in uniquely troubling ways. Perhaps something more mature is happening in our democracy. Women march: a slutshaming mayor resigns. Drivers petition: Government takes heed speed limit enforcement might require raising it.

The smartest explanation on my Facebook page was “the media’s artful ability to magnify a foolish quote”, a reference to InterReligious Organisation head Harrypersad Maharaj’s comments that girlchildren’s age has nothing to do with maturity, easily paraphrased as “After 12 is lunch”. Was this the own-goal by the IRO’s conservatives what won the match? Or was it their transparent conspiracy to manipulate mainline Christian groups into a “unanimous” position against changing any laws about religion. An imaginary fear that led Baptist Archbishop Barbara Burke to sell off Hindu and Muslim girls so she wouldn’t have to marry Hilda and Doris—something no church has been forced to in 22 countries with same-sex marriage. Church after church denounced the position, the Catholics calling it legalized statutory rape. The optics of Maharaj, Barbara Burke and ASJA’s Abzal Mohammed on the CNews set were a sepia portrait of the past.

Raziah Ahmed, who’s served as both gender minister and acting President, helped dig the hole. One of the best election soundbites of 2015 was the San Fernando West candidate saying while Faris Al Rawi might have the brawn, she had the belly. That belly was nowhere in evidence as she calling changing the laws a distraction and cited constitutional religious freedoms. Can local jihadists do the same?

Will the IRO survive this schism, and is its self-destruction good for all of us? My theory is that the domino in all this was the Chief Justice’s front-page remarks in April at the BocasLitFest, asking whether we’re a secular democracy or a theocracy, and citing child marriage. They are what got Bro. Harry’s dhoti in a twist. 

But maybe it was nothing in particular and everything at once. Increasingly in theorising the so-called 2011 Arab Spring of political activism or London’s violent 2015 anti-government protests, thinkers note such “irruptions” are not at all linear. Maybe we should just push hard so we get to the other side of this. And see just how much brawn the AG has.

n Kevin Baldeosingh returns next week

I wish Amery Browne the best in his new diplomatic life. Though we really met only after he’d grown into one of the brightest, most effective young professionals I’ve encountered, I feel I’ve known him since before he was born, and think I attended his parents’ wedding. 

I spent much of my childhood at his grandmother’s house, when several of his father’s nine brothers were the main men in my life, taught my sister and me to ride a bicycle, and their dog, Rusty, was responsible for my first dog bite. 

A man with an incredibly strategic streak, I didn’t always agree with his political choices. But he was a rare PNM politician who never had an issue taking a public position in support of my rights and dignity. I respect him immensely for that.

Moving my column into this slot is the second time recently I’ve been asked to step into Amery’s shoes. He’d recommended me to take over his spot as the sole man on a panel at April’s NGC BocasLitFest on human rights, which took its title from PNM chairman Franklin Khan’s comments about the need for 21st-century thinking on matters of sexuality and gender—part of the festival’s commitment to be a platform for big ideas. The festival organisers, whom I know well, didn’t take me on. 

They got the Chief Justice instead. As a consequence, I’ve argued, child marriage is poised to become history. There: I’ve written myself into history’s shadows.

Seriously, though, I worry. When—as seems to be a mere matter of drafting—child marriages are outlawed, what becomes of the issues raised by all sides in our unprecedented national conversation these past couple weeks about the sexuality and protection of girls? 

Across any differences about marriage laws, we all agree that girls’ sexual vulnerability is an enormous problem.

Gabrielle Hosein, in these pages, made the case that what’s at the root and needs to change is how our culture sexualises girls, then shames and blames them for being sexual. But she also pointed to root policy changes decision makers must undertake.

Just as marrying girls can’t be taken seriously as clerics’ proposed response to teenage pregnancy or sexual irresponsibility, outlawing child marriage doesn’t carry politicians far enough in meeting their obligation to ensure the rights, protection and sexual autonomy of girls. Amending marriage laws is low-stakes, Hosein argues, with minor political fallout. I would disagree, reading the torrent of letters to the editor and organisational statements: there’s actually political mileage in it.

What stunned me about the Government’s response at the recent Universal Periodic Review to proposals put forward by other states as commitments we should make to improving human rights was—apart from child marriage—we said yes to everything that had to do with women and gender.
Except, that is, for the one recommendation we ensure comprehensive sexuality education.

Seriously? We couldn’t commit to that? So the PNM has not in fact walked back from its rural, early-20th-century thinking that sexual education does not belong in schools, nonsense that fell out of the education minister’s mouth the minute he was sworn in.

Scroll down a few lines, below eliminating child, early and forced marriage, in the Global Sustainable Development Goal targets for gender: you’ll find ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health.

Rushing to “harmonise” an increased age of 18 for consent to sex and marriage won’t do young people any good if their parents and political leaders can still deny them access to sexual health information and services until that age. Especially those children who are sexually active, despite the age of consent, and despite their parents. 

Making 18 the age to consent to everything makes things harder for family planning and ob-gyn providers, who’ve been struggling over the past year that the age of sexual consent has increased with the risk of a $15,000 fine and seven-year jail sentence for serving thousands of young people we know need their services. Harmony may not be their friend.

“How else to protect our nation’s girls but with information about their bodies, health, safety, rights, options and sources of services and support?” Hosein asks. The urgent need to lower barriers, including age, to accurate sex education—for boys as well as girls—is a no-brainer, even for Barbara Burke. 

What most of us missed in heaping scorn on the Spiritual Baptist archbishop as she made the rounds on the airwaves with the IRO brass, defending the status quo on child marriage, abortion and people languishing in remand, was when she said, with all her matriarchal Laventille pedigree:

“What I believe should be the government approach now is getting into the primary school and teaching them—family life, sex. And we wouldn’t have all this problem. Teach them family life, what age…” And Hema cut her off.

Is the Orlando news cycle over? Do I still get to talk about it this week? Or are we back to our small lives? Where violence and bigotry are normal, expected, backdrop to the fete, the kiss, the ripe mango, the meaninglessness of work. Daily killings here, US mass shootings, terror attacks in Europe and Africa, have become so commonplace. When the media contacted me urgently about Omar Mateen opening machine-gunfire on 100 patrons at Pulse nightclub, even I didn’t grasp the largeness of it.

I’ve spent decades getting used to gay men dying chirrup-chirrup, in numbers that add up to many more than Mateen slew. From neglect, from stupidity, from disgust. From innocence. And—as it now seems in Mateen’s case—from each other.

I went out on a date with a gentleman from Laventille. Driving him home into an enormous full moon hanging over Park Street, he talked about living in the belly of the beast, the lovers and ex-lovers who’d died from a different kind of stupidity and violence than those I know. 

A stupidity and violence and unending death, not because of who he loves, but where he lives.

I was deeply hurt that Dr Rowley’s condolences over the “unspeakable” killings at the club could not name the blood-soaked fleshiness of who was shot, who was targeted. 

That erasure took on greater meaning coming after Ambassador Eden Charles at the United Nations last month, responding to 15 different states urging T&T: protect LGBTI people’s human rights. Charles, too, found people like me unspeakable. 

You could see him struggling. First “certain groups” came out. Then he mustered up “those affected.” Eventually, he managed “the LGBT and so on.” Afro-Trinbagonian men of their generation don’t know what to do with men like me.

Orlando could offer them the opportunity to legitimate the humanity of LGBTI people in policy and law, the way the Attorney General has seized on the IRO president’s self-immolation to leap forward towards outlawing child marriage. 

At the national consultation last week, a board member of Harrypersad Maharaj’s Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga Centre shared that, having been embroiled in the child marriage controversy, they consulted their parent organisation for guidance. The international body strongly supports gender equality, opposes child marriage and promotes the Sustainable Development Goals on gender.

A day before the Florida assassinations, I read the puzzling Caribbean Court of Justice judgment about homosexuals as prohibited immigrants. The CCJ pronounced that T&T’s obligation to admit every Caricom national, regardless to sexual orientation, is now part of our domestic law. 

But the statute saying otherwise could remain on the books. I noted that’s exactly what our politicians do—they withhold formal inclusion, while giving a bligh on not really banning us or hauling us from our bedrooms. 

Even on being killed, biennially diplomats like Ambassador Charles abstain when the UN resolves to condemn extrajudicial executions like last week Sunday’s, unsure we can take a position on sexual orientation.

A young journalist reporting Orlando told me said the PM couldn’t say it was a gay club, well, because of the Constitution. 

Which nowhere mentions homo- or heterosexuality. 

If anything—as the CCJ itself pointed out—it seems to give LGBTI people the same rights as others. But that’s the power even unenforced laws have to shape who we think can be afforded humanity.

For years, though, I’ve worked to turn conversation away from marriage and the buggery law, instead highlight politically harmless things the Government can do to extend the Constitution’s promises of equality and dignity to LGBTI people: Allow the Equal Opportunity Act to protect us—how could an anti-discrimination law treat some citizens inconsistently to others? 

Decriminalise un-coerced sex between youngsters consistently—not, as we cynically do, only when pregnancy can result. 

In the wake of Orlando, the Government could move swiftly to legislate either, without spending any political capital it would admittedly require to repeal sodomy laws. But the Attorney General is a smart man. And he has taught me a new Latin phrase. In pari materia. 

Launching PNM’s 2015 manifesto, Colm Imbert said the party had no position on LGBTI issues. Keith Rowley scoffed he wasn’t going to make fashion statements because an issue was in vogue. 

I guess 49 lost lives doesn’t make it fashionable, though another LGBTI activist said Rowley’s condolences were bandwagoning. But the AG has a new logic for PNM inaction: he’s not pulling just one thread, but the whole cloth, all 24 laws at once.

It was only when I saw the brown faces and the notes about who they were that I mourned. 

And I remembered my date. The Pulse massacre could offer us a way to take heed of the daily violence seething through the alleys east of the city, the bodies pooling in the central plain, the arms snaking up the hills of the Diego Martin valley. 

Violence we cannot gate or migrate or fete into a corner. Violence about whose roots we have no political position either. Violence we will not solve with security budgets, but social development, early education. Human rights. In pari materia.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Diary of a Mothering Worker with Gabrielle Hosein will return July 8

Much of the post-Brexit hubbub has been about the markets. Some social media critiques decry Britain’s enduring racism, with TrinBrits’s accounts of “Leave” voter neighbours’ cheery morning-after greetings about getting rid of those “other” immigrants. David Cameron’s resignation following the referendum prompted reflections on leadership.

For me, the result provokes more fundamental, vexing questions; about what “democracy” looks like in a globalised world.

On either side of the Pond, voters feeling left behind by capitalism, displaced from privilege, threatened by ethnic scapegoats, are making big, yellow-haired decisions that will alter the future of not just their own lives, but the world.

Michael Rosen’s 2014 poem circulated somberly last week, musing how fascism doesn’t “arrive… in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis,” but “as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were…remove anything you feel is unlike you.”

One of my earliest columns, during the nine-days-wonder of the right-of-recall campaign here, shared how much referenda and direct democracy scare me, especially in a winner-take-all culture where we repeatedly imagine it perfectly acceptable to have others decide what some can do with their own bodies.

Fixed election terms (another feature Trinis hanker to add to our Westminster framework), still brand-new in the UK, may hand British voters four years of Prime Minister Boris Johnson they didn’t quite reckon they were choosing at last week’s polls—with Americans not far away from electing Donald Trump, standardbearer of a party increasingly characterised by brash positions on science and reason, race, gun violence, healthcare, and women’s wombs.

I couldn’t imagine T&T’s voters being any less brutish or small-minded than those in ostensibly two of the world’s most mature democracies; wonder if the region’s 1950s and 60s decisions about Caribbean integration and our place in the world were any more forward-thinking. Or those we made in the ’80s. Often, like Sparrow, “I want to go back to Grenada, to teach the Cubans how to fight.”

But nostalgia for participatory democracy the Grenada Revolution aspired to create, and protect from elections, only aggravates the painful recognition that perhaps nowhere across the Commonwealth Caribbean are we meaningfully engaged with anything similarly nation building. That stain-your-finger democracy’s worth may be no deeper than flag-and-anthem independence.

Wondering two Junes ago what we’d be doing today, having re-elected the PNM, I wrote in my Sunday column: “We do have to start with the radical but simple idea that voting is not productive politics.”

I wrestled with how the “assemblage” of 2010 voters “who care about family and opportunity and security, but also care about gender and labour and justice and culture and inequality and environmental sustainability” could create “a politics that’s not about voting.” I worried that we’d become “politically unproductive…lazy… unimaginative,” and “the only reason there isn’t a political movement that offers us a different way to participate in power and policy” and aren’t “political frameworks for citizenship that move real power away from the tribalised ballot box” is that we haven’t built them as citizens.

I think referenda are a part of that laziness. A knee-jerk way for politicians to duck vision and leadership on any contentious issue, and simply hold a wet finger to the wind. A way to cede away rights and protection for anything unfashionable or irreverent to a pious majority. What is worse, I’m not sure that in plebiscites we’d even vote our own self-interest.

We’re so deeply invested in being seen as moral. Or to upholding a formal set of rules we are happy to exercise our own ability to circumvent, drool about breaking in the rumshop, but pretend we never breached ourselves as we punish our daughters.

Plus we just don’t trust each other. That we can’t is the premise of every election campaign.

The thing about referenda is that outcomes of popular democracy are only as good as the inputs. And who is teaching young Trinbagonians to think and act like citizens?

Brexit also begs, quite loudly, the question of Caricom. As do I—for two, perhaps uncommon reasons. I’m equally serious about both.

First, what use is our single-market mechanism if it can’t get local broadcasters licenses for the disappearing US TV shows we bootleg or mask our IPs to stream? Every time I watch “A continuación,” I wonder what’s Caricom good for if it can’t even get us some good American cultural imperialism.

My second beef is what I call Caricom’s lowest-common-denominator approach. Participating as a bloc in international negotiations over setting development goals and human rights norms, Caricom’s position gets pegged to what its most backward member state will support. Not only is the acceptable standard for my rights or health suppressed to the region’s worst performer, but our 14-country bloc seeks to drag down the global accountability bar. Needless to say, it’s on sexuality and gender where this matters most.

And no other child should, ever again. I found the well-preserved hole-punched computer card I took to the exam site four decades ago. Before we renamed it Secondary Entrance Assessment. Before we’d made a state-supported fetish of its rankings. My mother, a teacher with Ministry of Education contacts, heard that a boy from my school topped the exam list. It might be either Vickram Murthi or me, our teachers deduced. Only later did someone confirm. My father bought Veuve Clicquot. I kept the empty bottle, cork and tag for years.

Like child marriage, SEA is a traditional ritual the families involved are deeply invested in, that is fundamentally destructive to children’s development, and we urgently need to abolish. If same-sex schooling—another problem—wasn’t so firmly engrained in our educational system, SEA would long have disappeared. Were boys and girls competing on equal footing for places, few boys would pass for prestige secondary schools.

My condolences to every pre-teen and their family who got results last Tuesday.

To those who howled and wept at the biggest failure in their young lives, at the wasted lessons money, at the public shame. At the formal assessment of their 11-year-old fundamental lack of worth. For the bitterness reading “Take heart, some people does go El Do and still end up decent” Facebook statuses from people who went prestige school. Tell them go and brave the violence in those schools, and volunteer their hopefulness. Make them join your new fight—now you’ve lost the lottery that preserves educational inequality—to ensure quality secondary education in every school.

Condolences, also, to you youngsters pappyshowed by political officials and the media, your force-ripe quotes about the reward of sacrifice, work-life balance and juvenile stress. I remember how awkward I felt, the sense I was being acclaimed for doing something normal.

As all of you enter secondary school, you are receiving an early life lesson—that rank and privilege deeply govern our social order, that you live in a country that does not distribute value or opportunity equitably or widely enough, and you must always strive to remain on the right side of that scale. That SEA lesson you will carry throughout life. It is one your parents know well.

I am saddened over those of you who will learn that your success is merely about your personal attributes, not circumstance or social capital you were born with, that even at your age, others are responsible for their failures—including others from similarly humble backgrounds. 

I, too, never looked back to wonder about the futures of my 1973 classmates who would end up with different opportunities, in other schools. But Christmas before, at a holiday party at the orphanage down the hill from my Auntie Shirley’s house in Grenada, when the caregivers took away a resident’s gift toy to replace mine that I had complained was defective, the guilt made me understand privilege viscerally, and taught me an early lesson about injustice.

I weep for those of you and your families who have passed for the best schools. What your country is teaching you is how not to fight injustice. It is a lesson our colonially-rooted educational institutions will inculcate in you daily. You will be taught to accept it, and then to enforce it.

I remember watching my mother’s 1930s newsclipping of her name among a dozen on the list of Exhibition results, marvelling how few students government provided then with free secondary education. I marvel similarly every year how, almost a century later, with secondary education now universal, the exam retains such deep social anxiety and transformative power over young destinies. We can’t build a society on a vision of equal opportunity as long as we continue a procedure that sorts opportunity by age 12.

I don’t have immediate solutions. Quality public education is a policy challenge internationally. What that also means is there are ample lessons and models waiting to be applied here. None seem to be being implemented. The best idea—expanding students’ access to digital technology—became a duncyhead game of political kicks and kickbacks, underscoring exactly what SEA enforces—a public sense that some of our children are just not going to learn, and their families are wotless. An MP I really admired, campaigning in 2010, said students Kamla put into secondary school in 2000 passed through them like a dose of salts.

The Children’s Authority issued wonderfully thoughtful SEA results guidance. Another thing we can do, starting next year, is end the ridiculous ritual—an ethnic one, some say—of assigning national significance to which children come first on a fallible exam. It does them little good; it does the losers worse. I’m yet to hear anyone come forward—like some do with licks—testifying how the trauma of SEA results is character-building and morally necessary.

When I’d nervously started writing this column, Martin Daly, in one of his writings titled Fooling Ourselves, quoted my observation that “we don’t realise that an education system that makes losers out of so many is a key driver of criminality and endemic violence.” I was thrilled. My insight wasn’t because I’d topped SEA; I just said something really obvious.

None of this column’s playful predictions for 2015 came true. One or two—about Barry Padarath and oil prices—came close. I might be doing better than Yesenia, but last year-end, I gave up on forecasting. I close 2016 instead with questions left open. Here are the top five:

1. Who took that lovely new photograph of me?

This is the one I have an answer for. Rashmi Mathur is a local photographer who has captured a wonderful trove of images of Trinidad and Tobago’s humanity. You can find her portraits and profiles of fellow countrypeople in the Facebook group “People of Trinidad and Tobago.” More over, Humans of New York.

2. How much further will tertiary enrolment decline, when the full suite of policy changes to GATE kicks in towards the end of 2017? Will there be corresponding increases in Cepep enrolment?

We Trinis love our state welfare. Abuses or not, we all know exactly what GATE is supposed to do. With Cepep, we all know at heart it’s a patronage programme; but can anyone say what it was supposed to pretend to do?

Cepep was here today, my nephew announced last week. It was early afternoon, and I hadn’t noticed that they’d re-cut the grass between my property and the roadway he already pays the lawn-cutter to.

It was odd. The election had already come and gone. (Without a road being paved, mind you; but that’s another question). So their appearance was worth neither their votes nor mine.

I had missed the casual shouting and cussing that usually heralds their invasion of my quiet neighbourhood of many retirees.

He’d recognised their passage from the signature palm frond used to sweep up cuttings, which they had discarded on the ground in front my wall. For me, however, the unmistakable artefacts of the Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme’s visit were the two crumpled Broadway packs in the drain, and two empty cartons perched atop my wall from juice used to chase the contents of the empty white-rum bottle cocked in front the frond.

When the Barbados government slashed tuition subsidies, enrolment at UWI’s Cave Hill campus plummeted by almost half.

3. Will the pothole on Amber Drive ever be fixed?

All my neighbours want to know. A number of them have reported it. I have reported it. To local government. To WASA. To the Ministry of Works 623-MEND hotline. On their app Wize. Uploaded pictures. I got nice, engaging responses.

Kejan Haynes reported it, come on now! It endures.

Days after taking office, new Minister of Works and Transport Rohan Sinanan made an announcement. “Rohan: Potholes to be mended in 48 hours,” our Guardian headline read. It was three weeks before local government elections. This was the logistician credited in Prime Minister Rowley’s general election-night speech at Balisier House for engineering the PNM’s victory. I took his word for it.

There was some fine print about which potholes. But everyone I reached was already aware of this jewel of a pothole, and everyone promised to send people to see it.

I delightedly posted the Guardian’s story to a neighbourhood Facebook group. The young PNM candidate for our local government councillor liked the post. Looking good.

I’d stopped driving the logical way home months before, out of love of my axles. But on my way to the polls, I walked by just to verify the pothole was gone, and cast my appreciative vote.

When I got into the booth, instead of voting for or against either candidate, I wrote in the persistent pothole on my ballot. It has made a bigger impact on my life than either of them, one of whom I only saw on posters.

I live in a red constituency, so my vote counts for nothing marginally. Our corporation had the lowest election turnout nationally—22 per cent—though the councillor who liked my post boasts he scored highest among the corporation’s councillors. That’s 23 per cent of eligible voters.

Until candidates prove they are really listening to voters’ concerns, I think writing mine in on my ballot gives me the next best chance to make them as visible as I can as a voter.

4. Has Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh concluded his promised investigation into the Internet sex video purporting to have been shot over the wall of a Port-of-Spain General Hospital (POSGH) toilet stall?

The media drew his attention to this back on November 22, over a month ago. Has the North West Regional Health Authority identified and fired the Peeping Tom who boasted online that he/she shot the video by stalking two co-workers into a toilet, holding a device above the wall of the stall to video-record them, then broadcast it on the Internet? Is this employee, so easily driven to violate others’ privacy, still coming into contact with patients? Or does the fact it was two men filmed change everything?

Was the video another online hoax that enrolled a scandal-hungry media? Can the minister also report whether other POSGH toilets have full rolls of toilet paper, like the one in the video?

5. Will this column continue in 2017?

My editors have that answer.

Neither of two women, reported in the same story to have alleged similar assaults by PH rapists and accomplices, appears to have “cried.”

Doing laundry for a trip to Jamaica—whose persistent violence I’ve never tried to understand—I found in a pants back-pocket the five-minute remarks I’d delivered nervously three weeks before on the Wrightson Road Waterfront. Under the banner “Side by Side We Stand,” the Lloyd Best Institute facilitated a rally that gave a cross-section of us a soapbox for reflections about T&T’s particular culture of violence.

It was January 6, but little of us offered any epiphany. I recall the creeping feeling, wound up delivering the speech like an election stump, that it was just a lot of simple ideas.

Another speaker’s simple idea was: If men were being sexually assaulted, we’d have be a wholly different social response to the runaway epidemic of sexual violence in T&T.

But men are. And still we don’t.

Since Sparrow sang Family Size Coke in 1957, even popular culture has acknowledged sexual assault against men.

And since 2000, we’ve amended sexual offences legislation to include in the offence of rape all genders and orifices—“to reflect a gender neutral position with regard to the complainant and the victim… to include protection for victims of violent same sex activity,” Government told the United Nations in 2012. In 2015, the Children Act also brought into force a new, gender-neutral approach to sexual offences by adults against boys and girls, criminalising all penetration of a child equally.

Under successive directors of public prosecution, however, we’ve continued the lazy route of prosecuting anal rape of both men and women, using the same buggery law that criminalises consensual sex, thereby keeping our sodomy law open for business. No need to prove rape.

The visibility given to this young man’s rape report, over so many women’s, does nothing to protect victims of rape.

Instead, what explains both our prosecutorial practice and the rape-shaming headline is this comment on the Facebook page of Dr Wayne West, one of our exports to Jamaica, where he leads a faith-based movement against sexual freedom: “The concept of a boy being raped depends on one’s ideological positions and political objectives…one may well define a punch in the eye as rape.”

Headline innuendo and state prosecutions that obfuscate whether men have been raped ensure sexual violence carries for men and boys a shame of being unmanly, and deepen men’s investment in keeping sexual assault feminised.

Reporting that “Police said that there are several reports of a man pretending to be a PH driver who has been preying on young men seeking transport at nights” doesn’t focus us on the routineness of this reality for women who “travel,” nor on the need to increase public transportation safety for everyone. What it generates is a sense of the exceptional nature of this kind of predation and predator.

The many men out there who prey on women without arrest remain bad people we don’t really know; not the men we join in sooting women, or the men in our families and rumshops we’ve shared our sexual conquests with.

In other words, sensationalising sexual assault of men is bad for men and for women.

Re-reading the sheet of paper forgotten in my back pocket made me reflect that real change of any kind requires more than platitudes. Certainly making any difference on crime in T&T takes persistence and tactical strategy. And what struck me at “Side by Side” was how differently different speakers saw the problem of violence.

But big, simple, shared ideas are a starting point for any social change, and those ideas have fallen out of our nation-building generally, displaced by tribalism. The dumbest, yet clearest thing I had to offer the rally was that “All of us must ensure a culture of justice, opportunity and dignity in our nation”—a no-brainer that if we do not wish young people to become criminals, the country must deliver opportunities that compete with crime. Although I did include in that the bolder idea that opportunity includes the opportunity to imagine and to lead change.

Men ought to be talking much more about rape and the rape culture we create, which makes women’s bodies unsafe in their homes, the streets, and our stores.

One simple idea I proffered at the Waterfront was that well-known root solutions to violence against women—the kinds of men we all raise; how men hold each other accountable; the power or shame we assign to feminine traits—also protect men’s and trans people’s bodies and differences from violence.

Voices of a surprising number and stature have taken the Attorney General to task for his “tactical” decision to remove a provision (requiring a 60 per cent margin of votes for passage) originally inserted into the marriage amendment bill, once it reached committee stage in the Senate, when bills are modified. Retaining the “three-fifths” provision would have required Opposition support in providing votes beyond the Government’s 56 per cent majority in the House of Representatives to pass the legislation there later this month.

A dangerous precedent, an assault on the constitution, shocking, belligerent, hasty and autocratic, several of my chattering-class colleagues have importuned. (Save Kevin Baldeosingh, who delighted in the manoeuvre, and said he was now voting PNM.) Hamid Ghany saw it causing a “firestorm of controversy.”

I’m sure most citizens neither noticed, nor care.

Indeed, the unease among those in civil society who’ve pressed both the UNC and PNM governments to amend the marriage laws was why the special majority provision was included in the AG’s bill in the first place. That seemed the disappointingly tactical move—a political tack to either blame the Opposition for the legislation’s failure, or sidestep any courage in human rights leadership, by forcing the Opposition to share the risk.

Politics of that sort was the reason the Children’s Act five years ago failed to take on these very issues, which until now the Senate’s Independent bench seemed to be the only parliamentarians with the belly to champion, abstaining all when the final bill leaving child marriage intact passed in early 2012. There was this moment in the Senate’s committee phase of that bill, in the wee hours, when another attorney general turned to Opposition Senator Hinds, noting the Independents’ hankerings, and said he wasn’t really minded to alter the bill. Unless the PNM was.

They weren’t; and the current AG, then a Senator, has repeatedly invoked the unfinished business in that Senate session in his legislative campaign on child marriage.

But back to the trampled Constitution. Dr Ghany’s previous column elucidated in his schoolmasterly way how our Constitution, uniquely in the Commonwealth, adopted the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights framework. How this translates into legislative practice is that Parliament can routinely enact laws “inconsistent with” the rights enshrined in the Constitution by simply declaring so; which then requires each house pass the legislation with a 60 per cent majority. That amounts to ten per cent or just three votes more in either house. Votes can come from anywhere: exclusively from Government if it has 25 or more of the 41 House seats; and from just three of the nine Independent senators.

Not all new laws that address rights require supermajorities. And commentators seem to ignore the AG’s words to that effect piloting the marriage bill, and those by lawyers on the Independent Bench in the debate.

Ultimately, how any legislation alters the balance of constitutional rights is subject to a test of reasonableness and proportionality. If it meets this test is answered only by the courts—whether passed by a 50.01 per cent or a 100 per cent majority. Political co-operation of an Opposition Michael Harris described as “obstreperous in the extreme” in enacting such law is no assurance of its substantive constitutionality. Indeed, the three-fifths legislative provision, intended as added protection, can instead embolden Parliament to enact rights-altering law by supermajority, without regard to proportionality. Commentators’ much-making of the scared three-fifths, and its marriage bill deletion as a reckless move that will lead to costly litigation, misses the point that the Maha Sabha will sue the AG if he changes Hindu marriage law, three-fifths or no three-fifths.

Some Caribbean legal scholars argue our Canadian three-fifths provision—that’s nowhere else in the region—masks the true test of constitutionality and ought, like the savings clause, to go away. It may simply erect another barrier to minorities and unpopular groups getting rights respected by majoritarian legislatures with cowardly politicians.

Just last year, our politics of morality seemed stubbornly predictable: Politicians in Government would abstain from advancing sexual rights and freedoms, in a public performance of piety or deference to “public opinion.” Out of power to make change, they’d be eloquent about rights. But last month’s performances on both sides of the aisle show sexuality politics now has—Basdeo Panday’s famous 2005 rendering of Machiavelli’s tenet—a morality of its own.

A PNM AG was championing sexual autonomy. The Opposition was offering up Senate seats to give the patriarchal case for 12-year-old marriages greater voice. A legislative proposal for minor girls’ marriages with parental permission—and the children’s involvement—was tabled. And finally, Kamla cried that rights to family life are being trampled by imperious legislation to ban marriage of minors. I’m unsure what toppled the old order.

What has been drowned out in all this is girls’ rights. To have a say over their own bodies. To be protected. To sexual education and health services. To decide whom to marry. To not be criminalised or punished for sex or pregnancy. And to marry under 18, with judicial supervision and without parental consent. Sadly, all the chatter about other rights and marrying them off pregnant has drowned out a coalition of voices asking parliamentarians for sexual autonomy for adolescents and respect for their evolving capacity.

I like Keith Rowley, I have to confess. Despite his clear flaws, his ill-temperedness, the periodic ugliness of his masculinity. Despite my puzzlement at many people he chooses to assign leadership.

I have always been a serious admirer of his charisma, striking intelligence and considerable oratory, whether at lofty nation-building or hoarse picong.

Perhaps my fondness is because of the very Africanness some allege is the source of local oligarchs' ambivalence over his leadership-worthiness.

Arguably, such sentiment should not matter in these pages.

But I've lamented here how the eagerness among those writing on our editorial pages to strengthen a culture of public accountability often descends into an off-with-their-heads intolerance for error that doesn't allow for leaders' vulnerability or growth. I want my political leaders to evidence their humanity.

And it's no secret that I believe that the Opposition's unmasking of any pretence Keith might have to moral piety in intimate matters is good for the nation, and that it's enabled a more honest approach to policy and lawmaking on sexuality and in response to the actual forms our Caribbean families take.

I also welcomed the crassness with which Dr Rowley told the nation of a friend's fear of a digital-rectal examination, as he shared results of his own prostate cancer tests last year, using a graphic sound bite the electronic media loved replaying as often as possible.

I did not see in those words the brutish crudeness focus-group consultants appear to have advised the UNC is a representation of Rowley that has negative traction among some voters.

I saw his unvarnished remarks then as a powerful example of a prime minister being honest with the nation's men about masculinity and homophobia, and how they harm our health.

But I think the Prime Minister is really afraid of his softer side.

My dear friends in Womantra make so many go tizzic on social media when, as feminist activists, they decide where it's important to target their own activism and bodies, unapologetically.

Every time Womantra garners public attention, hundreds type furiously from their armchairs, opining about what is protest-worthy and how bad feminism is. I wish all that energy went into making change.

Last week Womantra led many others taking our Prime Minister to task for his public remarks about women and domestic violence. Some of those scoldings were partisan critiques, including ones from challengers to his leadership of the PNM, which no one should take seriously.

But Dr Rowley was wrong for both the content and tone of his remarks: "I am not in your bedroom. I am not in your choice of men."

The reasons why several others have already pointed out. First, he got it dead wrong. Women are often killed precisely when they exercise good "judgment," in leaving a violent relationship. An order of protection is not a piece of paper: it is the core state enforcement remedy we have for domestic violence, yet one a PNM official like Tobago Assembly-member was found to have violated flagrantly.

The Attorney General must promote the essential and dedicated role of police in enforcing protection orders as law, not a way they "try to help" victims.

Neither is domestic violence simply a matter of individual relationships: it is a cultural issue.

The Community Development Minister's role in addressing it ought to be strengthening how communities are ensuring victim protection, engaging violent men, and teaching boys-not just girls-about choices.

What baffled me most as the licks rained down on Keith was why he failed to learn anything from the Port-of-Spain mayor he led his party in pushing off the ledge after eerily similar utterances, exactly a year ago.

Had Raymond Tim Kee apologised unreservedly and with contrition following equally cynical comments about the discovery of murdered Japanese pannist Asami Nagakiya in the Savannah last Ash Wednesday, I bet he would easily have kept his job.

How had the PM failed to internalise that lesson?

I wondered aloud why it never occurred to Keith Rowley last week to simply soften up, and say: I was wrong. I'm eager to learn from my mistakes. How do women think I and my Government can? It seemed so simple to me. Because he was wrong.

Those in his party and Government waste political capital and state resources defending his comments.

Worst of all was the way the Gender and Child Affairs portfolio in the PM's Office was compromised by being enrolled as the framework through which his defensive apology was communicated.

Those who love the Prime Minister need to teach him this. It is not only the lesson every good spouse learns-to say "Yes, dear" to diffuse conflict.

Contrition is a powerful act of leadership. It is something we need to teach boys. It is one thing that will help prevent gender-based violence.

There are many opportunities in the Prime Minister's national conversations to still do so.

Contrition is a powerful act of leadership. It is something we need to teach boys. It is one thing that will help prevent gender-based violence.

I promised myself to get through Valentine’s Day whole. I’d call another single friend, and we’d take each other out. I couldn’t think who. But I’d be fine. I’d hold my breath, and my head down, and not feel lonely. My social media feed was kind. The ex and I patched something up, surprisingly, just before, so instead of haunting me, we were having remarkable exchanges about our friendship.

Then this thing happened. I chatted with a more recent heartthrob. A man who teaches young Black boys.

His carelessness with my past attachment had disappointed me deeply. We’ve seen each other since twice; both times I’d winced. Realising we were planning to attend the same event, I shared that the tabanca lingers, and it would be difficult.

“Colin…gimme ah damn chance this hour de #@* night. ROFL.”

And I couldn’t help wondering what he says to little boys he is teaching, for many of whom he is the closest grown man in their life, when they feel pain. “Give it a laugh; it’s just in your head?”

Because it’s men toting like me, but who have been taught to not be acknowledged when they are hurt, who burn down their houses with their children inside, or show up where the women who’ve left them work, and kill them spectacularly. Men my friend genuinely thinks he’s teaching, as boys, the tools to cope with pain. Men who will hear in their lover’s dismissive laugh at their outrageous masculinity, the derision of their teacher or their mother that time they cried.

And I heard myself say to him: “Doh try and teach me dat unless you want to dead.” It wasn’t a joke like his. In his voice boiling in the blood in my ears was every man who’d ever told me carelessly that the pain he was causing me was my imagination.

So, if I’ve been in therapy over and over, over 45 years, and still don’t know how to be hurt or made fun of, what expectations can we have for men our society has offered no useful lessons at all in self-reflection, emotional intelligence, or coping?

Other than the surprise visit one relative paid her husband and his woman with me in tow, I’ve never been inside a domestic violence situation. I’ve generally chosen good men. Artsy ones. Bright ones. Okay, two addicts. But working men. One with a PhD. Ones who’ve shown knee-buckling charm. Ones who’ve offered incredible tenderness.

And with no recent exception, ones incapable of emotional accountability. I did think for a minute they were bad choices. But at one point I discovered—these are the men out there; these are the men we have raised.

Men we’ve deprived of the lessons in emotional discipline we teach girls from small. How to care for themselves. How to care for others. How to care about others. How to attach. How to negotiate. How to manage homework and housework and pleasure. How to acknowledge and work through pain. Lessons in balance and mindfulness. In self-denial.

Boys we’ve just let loose to go where their good feelings lead, encouraged to cover up bad feelings or risk shame, and forgiven for carelessness. And when they unreflectingly go where their groins carry them, we smile at their manhood.

In 2001, I left a five-year relationship that was my biggest success ever at love. I had hurt my lover deeply, could not bear the thought of doing it again, and refused to reconcile. I still feel responsible. In the past several affairs I’ve ended, however, each of my partners has bluntly declined to confront or account for any misdeeds. They’re sorry. But that’s that, let’s move along now.

It’s driven me to fury. Fury that makes me realise how much I am also one of those men we’ve raised. I find myself straddled across masculinity: a victim of its carelessness; a resident of its fury.

My feelings were unreasonable, improbable, poor choices, my friend kept saying. As with his boys, he said, he points out when feelings are unfounded or illegitimate.

I couldn’t convince him to step back from making fun of them. Or to share his own. I couldn’t create space where we could live in the discomfort of feelings, or where they were not something uncomfortable at all. And that’s the thing itself. Men don’t get spaces to be safely intimate with others that aren’t sexual or sexually vulnerable.

Gay men do have this uncanny way that we provide permission for our straight brothers to be vulnerably honest in ways they’d feel ashamed or unmanly to be with heterosexual men and women, which still surprises me each time it happens. But the closeness is unbearable, I want to fall in love, and inevitably say something stupid that hurts, or step away so not to.

Once again, I don’t have answers. But they’re somewhere in how we can raise boys differently. “With dolls,” my friend whose son is just off to university, said bluntly.

That first-century saint with the February 14 feast-day was tortured and martyred. But maybe we can give little boys better tools for getting through it whole.

Following the 19-hour Panorama Savannah party, the half-a-dozen calypsonians suing TUCO over its Dimanche Gras selections, and whatever controversy over-costumed bands or street violence emerges today and tomorrow, later this week into next, there will be ample public commentary and handwringing about the inefficiency and stupidities of our Carnival.

When this happens predictably every year, even as state bureaucrats’ tone-deaf pronouncements about a safe and orderly Carnival are recycled, I usually wonder: could the festival of the God of Inversion—Karene Asche should really know better—be “well run”? What would an orderly bacchanal look like?

Could even the best global managers ever discipline Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival, a sprawling ritual with so many moving parts, origins and constituencies, into any efficiency? And wouldn’t that be to fundamentally chop it off from its riotous, defiant and populist roots—the way North American Carnivals have been bleached into public safety, order and corporate commodification—turning it into an inorganic tourist economy festival the way Eastern Caribbean carnivals once ran?

I always remember my Carnivals in Brooklyn for each of the eight years of the Giuliani administration that had policed parties out of the neighbourhood mas camps, exiled panyards to the industrial border with Queens, and introduced a “Turn Music Off” LED sign at the end of the parade route.

I looked forward to the sudden moment during J’Ouvert when the Grenadian jab molassie posse would come down. After they had passed, not a single police vehicle was left white; and for every year they kept up a single, singular chant of the Mayor’s name and the three-syllable orifice from which he had emerged at birth.

I’ve never held a warm embrace of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of economic self-interest as a way to organise anything in the public interest. But any casual observer would notice that the areas of Carnival the state has stayed out of appear to be those where the market has enabled the greatest commonsense and efficiency.

The profiteering, production-line bathsuit-and-beads mas bands. The obscenely-exclusive fetes. The free movement of music, which has moved from the pirate CD to the Internet and to the cusp of an electronic composition becoming road march.

On the other hand, it is precisely those areas that government and special interest groups (SIGs) have attempted to organise through sponsorship or discipline that have been the most spectacular failures: The refusal to accept solutions to the hours-long parade-of-the-bands bottleneck at the Savannah, which has made me decide playing mas is sufferation. The hopelessness of the judging of state-sanctioned competitions—pan being the most glaring example of the meaninglessness of one- and two-point differences between scores of competing bands. The inability of most of what I find artful and imaginative in calypso to make it into Dimanche Gras.

I particularly struggle to understand why the model of judged competitions continues to dominate and distort Carnival. I want to hear good pan and good calypso in manageable doses. Do I care who “wins”?

It’s the first thing I’d eliminate were I the Carnival czar. With International Soca Monarch the private market hasn’t succeeded any better than the state and SIGs at a competition that avoids the smell of patronage or the glaring confusion that we just don’t agree on quality or form. Besides those patrons who haven’t forgiven Machel for his violence, I think I know what anyone would answer if given a choice between seeing the soca artist lineup in the Stadium on Monday or Friday of the same week.

Without state support, Carnival competitions would simply collapse, allowing cultural evolution or the market to replace them with something more sustainable and rational.

Live brass is back on the road this year, to the delight of so many in my generation. Bands are deciding to forego the Savannah bottleneck. Portrayal mas that requires discomfort and dedication for its joy has remained alive, though no longer dominant, with designers from a new generation. Masqueraders afraid of the jamettes will hopefully go back up on top the trucks, party on the fringes of the capital and give people back the road.

Does any of this require regulation? Where in our most significant national festival (or at least the most significant creole one) is it appropriate? Should taxpayers be funding anything other than infrastructure and security? I’d prioritise increased immigration and customs officers on duty for arriving visitors over free doubles and Solo. I’d start with banning ropes around anything on the road but drink trucks.

Seriously. But more seriously, I believe government’s other core role in Carnival ought to be to reward innovation. Seed ideas. Enable think-tanks. Preserve old forms. Provide traditional mas characters with two music trucks and support for academies to teach the traditions. Provide incentive funding and profit-matching for successful ventures.

Too much of our thinking rests on patronage approaches—money for Sparrow; a house for Minshall—and too little on market approaches. Calypso Rose’s French producer didn’t give her a house or car.

Finally, I hope my friend Sonja Dumas will accept the job as Carnival czar to make at least some of this rethinking happen.

I particularly struggle to understand why the model of judged competitions continues to dominate and distort Carnival. I want to hear good pan and good calypso in manageable doses. Do I care who “wins”?

The past two weeks have been a watershed for policing. The National Security Minister’s “oops, I didn’t mean crime-free” Carnival holiday saw incidents in Scarborough and La Brea where police officers and a vehicle were attacked by citizens, one officer rendered unconscious. Among Port-of-Spain’s annual Carnival stabbing and violent robbery victims were current and former security force members. The Tuesday before, galvanised by the police shooting of Mikeal Lancaster, with television cameras rolling, Laventille residents openly named for the Police Commissioner and their Parliamentarian officers they described as “savages” and gang-affiliated. The media published their names—the residents, that is, not the policemen.

The collapse of policing and the paralysis of leadership in fixing it aren’t new. But they are now completely unmistakable. On Wednesday Minister Dillon introduced a political spinphrase to engage with this impotence, one so thoroughly ironic you can’t help wonder if its choice isn’t deeply cynical: “We have minimised crime.”

My encounters with the protective services Carnival Monday and Tuesday seem remote from this violence and anarchy. But they do feel intimately linked with the political deafness and disconnect of Edmund Dillon’s Ash Wednesday press release.

Dropping the folks to Jerningham Ave to cross the stage with Ronnie & Caro was a breeze. Unlike pan Saturday, the north perimeter of the Savannah had two-way traffic and police directing it; and Belmont’s streets were unobstructed. But habit took over and, instead of retracing my steps, I took off down Norfolk Street into Observatory, up and down Bath to Piccadilly and Nelson, figuring I’d find a route to Wrightson Rd. At Independence Square, uniformed officers, weighted down by automatic weaponry and sweltering in bulletproof clothing, casually waved to vehicles to turn around.

I pulled up to one, wound down the window, and let the inhumane volume of the passing big truck in. “Good morning, Officer. How do I get to Wrightson Rd?” “You have to turn around and go back so.” As I drove forward to turn, another who hadn’t been paying attention would cooyah his mouth insouciantly at me, word as well that I couldn’t go that way. I didn’t respond verbally; he didn’t move. I would ask the first one a second time: “Yes. But how do I get onto Wrightson Rd?” And as I insisted I needed a solution to the blocked road, and as he offered yet again “You have to go back so,” it would begin to dawn on me that he had no idea how to get there, had nothing to offer me. All his firepower and camouflage and brawn was useless for anything but blocking the road. He eventually made directions up, which got me lost, driving up and down Eastern Main Rd. I found the Beetham—going east—turned around at Maritime Plaza, a manoeuvre for which there is hardly any signage—thinking of European tourists winding up in East Dry River or Beetham Gardens.

I’d had a glimmer of hope on Monday. Stink and dutty and mashup after Jouvay in Woodbrook, I returned to a block full of cars, blocked by a food cart at the northern end, where I’d deliberately chosen to park to avoid music truck traffic. Every vehicle had been wrecked.

No cash. No ATM card. No state for public transport. Almost no charge in the phone. I approached one of three police officers idling by Adam Smith Square, badge-numbers obscured by their bulletproof vests, to gripe—and find out where the car would have been towed. “Either Sea Lots or Movietowne.” The expletives curled around how was I to know and the simple measure of putting up a “No Parking” sign. To which I got that Carnival parking regulations are published in the papers annually for me to read. “So can you tell me where I can park when I come back out later? It’s not in today’s paper.” Her gestures made clear helping me was sooo not her job.

I insisted. “Anywhere off the parade route,” she made up an answer. Which was where I was parked when I was wrecked, of course.

A warning about laws against obscene language. An encouragement to make an arrest—and papers—(maybe I’d get dropped to the impound). But she made clear she wasn’t going to be doing that much work. Fellow officers sidled up to reinforce that I needed to move along, especially since I was so ill-behaved, encouraged her to dismiss me.

Kneeling in the road to show evidence of contrite good behaviour; begging for information. Still no answers for where the car was, or where to park.

Dragging ourselves to MovieTowne, an older officer trying valiantly to block Carlos Street with no barrier and no machine gun said our car was in Sea Lots; and noted since TTPS has started putting Carnival traffic restrictions in the paper, they’ve stopped deploying officers to put out “No Parking” signs.

Over my hour or so in line at the Central Market spillover impound, dozens of us languished, several half-naked, greasy and paint-smeared in the drizzle. Only when I got near the front, an officer informed me I couldn’t enter a government office shirtless; find something to cover myself from my car. I insisted they’d have to find a solution.

One who’d sidled over after the exchange did—enforcing the pointless rule by taking my documents and money and bringing me back the receipt. When the supervisor I’d requested arrived, I was able to congratulate him, and he smiled: “We’re trying.” And then he spoiled it all. An Eastern Caribbean-accented man put on a show of Canadian self-assertion (despite multiple remonstrances from others in line that the protest they were joking about earlier actually achieves nothing), started phone-recording, pitched his money down, and was shoved out the office and promised to be served last of all.

In the face of policing’s collapse, tiny ways two officers made me human seemed enormous. But they point out how even in the smallest things officers can’t bring the simplest measure of empathy or solution-seeking to the job.

I watched the TV docudrama, Suffragette, last week. It popularised a piece of social history I was never taught that the turn of the 20th century campaign in Britain to extend the vote to women involved terrorist tactics by women that included pelting rocks through store windows, blowing up postboxes, setting fires in churches, sabotaging telecommunications and public suicide. Women jailed would go on hunger strikes and were force fed to keep them alive.

My deepest acquaintance with the Suffragist movement before the film was through its depiction in the Disney comedy, Mary Poppins, which was a childhood rite for many Trinis of my generation. Early in the movie, the character Mrs Winifred Banks, the dizzy wife of the thoroughly British London household where Julie Andrews’s character floats in to be the magical nanny, joins her domestics in the kitchen, marching and singing, in cross-class solidarity, the anthem “Sister Suffragette.”

One phrase that remains etched in my childhood memory from the well-worn turns of the 33 RPM vinyl cast album my Aunt Cynthia brought as a gift on her visit home from the States is the last line in the song’s opening verse:

“Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.”

It didn’t rhyme. It was one of my earliest lessons in feminism.

Like so much of the Disney studios’ work—long, long before the new LeFou—the movie masks, beneath its musical entertainment, considerable social dialogue. About the contest in roles between men and women; and about how children ought to be raised. Like so many of those childhood moments that unconsciously imprint our ideas, the American-made film is also the root of much of my imagination of that romantic Edwardian era of British imperial mercantilism and prosperity.

It’s this second film that’s been on my mind more over International Women’s Day. Yes: the saccharine musical one about gender roles and childrearing methods with the mocking line about masculinity, which reminds me of how I described it in one of my earliest columns—really delicious, but not really very good.

The same idea I realise I was struggling with in a recent column purporting to be about dating, relationships and St Valentine’s Day, but that was really about the crisis of masculinity.

I’ve been chatting about the column with a few readers. One woman offered: “I wonder whether men feel guilty about treating people badly, or taking things—physical things, time, love, energy, etc—from people as much as women do. They take and take. And we let them. But even if we don’t, they take and take.”

And I want to campaign for us to take even more.

Feminism, let’s argue, is about women having equitable access to all the things that men do. Power. Leadership. Agency. Sexual safety. Choice. Pleasure. Income. To walk away from crying children and dirty wares.

I witness the powerful work some of my friends are doing fathering daughters to be bold and safe and playful. It’s more visible with those who are single; as men tend to let their partners parent. For so many other girls, however, incest, violence and daily lessons about their lack of worth are what they get. Reversing that is work all of us are called to do.

But more and more, I am concluding that girls are given a heap of things that boys aren’t. A commitment and art for caring for others and themselves. The capacity to feel. Grace in managing desire and pain and denial. Skills at conflict resolution. Discipline and balance. Tenderness and vulnerability. Dolls.

Boys chronically need all of those. As boys. As men. Making these things—often devalued as feminine—valuable not only increases our access to them. Making the things women beat us at important also increases women’s equity.

So I think I have found my “big idea” I keep talking about us needing to anchor our work at nation building. Threaded through everything I have had to say in this column about rape culture, crime, the violence everywhere, the dutty child fathers, the anti-evidence policymakers, even my own loneliness and heartbreak, is this big idea that we just haven’t raised boys better.

That we are really raising them to be rather stupid.

And as much as Women’s Day ought to be about women and girls, this thing about raising boys is sitting at the root of so many of the things women would want to march about. The wonderful nature of this past Saturday’s Life in Leggings women’s rights solidarity march is how we were encouraged to “Bring yuh message and come.”

How we raise boys is mine. And Keith Rowley’s now, too, I see.

“Where Womantra?” Trinbagonian men continue to ask derisively, as if they were looking up agnostically into the Gotham skies for the local superheroines. But, actually, that introit and its companion “Why Womantra eh do something?” Are really ways to lyrically manhandle the arrogance of the upstart group and its young women leaders—my friends Stephanie Leitch, Amanda McIntyre and Khadija Sinanan—in their work of expanding public ideas about both feminism and social protest.

Men in Barbados similarly have made fun of LifeInLeggings, a movement inspired by Ronelle King and Allyson Benn (which, like Womantra, arose online) that has empowered women to speak out cathartically, across class and age, about their daily experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. Men coined hashtags like LifeInBoxers and EggplantEntries to replicate the very dismissive sooting women were naming, and to argue that men too suffer gender oppression.

Womantra and Life In Leggings were both behind domestic marches last weekend commemorating International Women’s Day. They took place in co-ordination with similar events across six Caribbean capitals, including Georgetown, Kingston, Nassau and St John’s (Roseau’s got stormed out). Several reflected a particular national inflection of gender-based violence: murders for Port-of-Spain; taking back the streets for Barbados—and for Jamaica child sexual abuse.

Kingston’s activity was a survivor empowerment march against sexual violence organised by yet another nascent movement of young feminist women—their particular passion the sexual epidemic of abuse of girls, often by clergy, and the chronic impunity and protection perpetrators enjoy.

Jamaican men are not sniggering, though.

The Tambourine Army set out last Saturday from Molynes Street’s Covenant Moravian Church. The collective takes its name from an incident at another Moravian congregation, Nazareth Church, in Manchester, following the arrest of its pastor, Rupert Clarke, 64, charged with having sex with a 15-year-old. At his arraignment, the principal of an area girls’ school, Heather Murray, showed up in solidarity—with the accused. After howls of protest, she served a two-week suspension.

As he tried to bring order to a protest at the church by 14 survivors of childhood sexual abuse, a woman took an instrument to the head of the head of the denomination, Dr Paul Gardner. The blow was a vigilante charge against the leader himself, who later resigned, along with his deputy, as accusations swirled that church leaders knew of sexual abuse and failed to act.

Clarke had powerful defenders. Latoya Nugent (one of the three Tambourine Army founders, along with Nadia Spence and Taitu Heron), who wrote she ought to have used a more harmful weapon, has not. She has picked fights with everyone, including me, pulling out of the panel I travelled to Jamaica for, because I wouldn’t change my presentation. She’s told off older, long-suffering feminists.

Frustrated with the police and courts which, like so many across the Caribbean, have failed to deliver justice for abused women and children, the Tambourine Army has fashioned itself as “a radical movement that was formed organically out of an urgent recognition to advocate differently for the rights of women and girls.” They launched a simple campaign: SayTheirNames. On social media, women began to name their abusers and the abusers of those they loved, with more powerful weapons than Nugent used to avenge her partner.

Jamaican women with powerful voices disparaged Nugent’s violence and disrespect, writing they would not be shaking a tambourine last weekend.

The march came, 700 strong, and media ignored it.

Tuesday police arrested Nugent.

Not for assault. Not for libel—for which truth is, after all, a defence.

Men whose names she had published online launched complaints. And Jamaica’s police charged Nugent for cybercrimes, and took her to the Counter Terrorism and Organized Crime branch.

She suffered a series of seizures in custody. Her well-known doctor was denied access because he couldn’t prove he was a doctor. A friend found her unresponsive in detention, and she was taken to Kingston public hospital. There’s no record in the station diary she complained of illness—or was assaulted during her arrest—Communications Unit Superintendent Stephanie Lindsay said, in response to claims.

Section 9(1) of the 2015 Cybercrimes Act criminalises using a computer to send anyone any data that is obscene, constitutes a threat, or is menacing in nature and which causes annoyance, inconvenience, distress or anxiety to the receiver or any other person.

The UK Guardian published a pithy article late Wednesday. But, outside of Jamaica, Caribbean media have been stunningly silent.

Last month, another woman was charged under the Act after posting her boyfriend was accused of rape and murder.

Immediately following their arrest of Nugent, Jamaican police warned the public that misuse of social media platforms to post “child pornography, images of carcasses, videos of domestic violence, public mischief and false news” on social media...could be dangerous, lead to distress and possible breaches of the law.”

Jamaican writer Kei Miller blogs: “In my own church, where women were expressly forbidden from speaking in church, old Sister Gilzene always brought her tambourine...She could not speak, but she could be loud...the noise of the tambourine was never an elegant sound.”

It’s heartbreaking that so many of us across the Caribbean who can speak so loudly have had so little to say about all these abuses. And all we can ask here is: “Where Womantra?”

It was the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking week on Trinidad’s killing fields. A week to despair, to give up. I had wanted to write about Kevin Baldeosingh making fun of a state institution trying to take sexual harassment seriously.

I had wanted to write about the opinion column, its enormous role and importance, and where ours locally stack up against the general state of our journalism.

I’d wanted to write, too, about Derek Walcott and why his salty reading of The Mongoose, that jawdropping poem about Naipaul, is how I will much more remember him than “the Hallmark one”—as some have dubbed Love After Love—the work appearing everywhere that risks becoming his popular signature.

Instead, I’m going to write—not quite on violence and murder—but about it.

Walcott’s mongoose “cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian.” And, like it, so many of us find ourselves committed to a performance of the pathology of this place we call home. We are in a competition for who can be most hopeless or cynical or sneering.

This week, a manager at St Christopher’s gas station on Wrightson Road surprised me, in responding to my Facebook post about his cashier’s “hoggishness” with action: not just an apology; but gratitude for the complaint; follow-up that the employee was counselled; and a commitment to my customer loyalty. He’d won new customers in minutes. One person in my feed dismissed his post as corporate speak. Another friend was wittier: “Colin, what country are you in?”

My bright spot of customer service could not salve how especially unliveable and helpless, the country felt last week. A place where our children’s dreams would reflect the death of ours, to paraphrase another towering poet of Caribbean origin, Audre Lorde. But the idea that where we live is unliveable is itself unliveable.

Colonialism’s strategy—to teach us the psychic feat of living with impossible contradictions, to value rules over justice—is unsustainable. Simply because the rules no longer work. And the fruit of that immunity to brutality we swallowed daily long past Independence is the killing and killing and killing that was irredeemably everywhere last week.

The Prime Minister, too, with more a steelness than his common irascibility, told the nation that he too wants to kill. Not because he believes killing will lead to less killing. But because it is the only currency of justice that we know.

Lesbian/gay/bi/trans/intersex people are just as inextricably bound up in this killing as we are in the nation’s destiny and the failing faith in it.

In a space of just one month this year, we heard reports of three gay men murdered, all Caribbean migrants; and rumours of more. Though no evidence has been put forth that the motivation was bias, LGBTI people are specially vulnerable to victimisation and violence, simply because our lives aren’t seen as terribly worthy.

“We kiss in the shadows”: the very act of finding each other makes us unsafe. Many of us have a history of being mocked or dismissed by police when we follow Minister Dillon’s injunction to report crimes and name our abusers. Much of the violence against us remains unmeasured, even by community groups, who can offer no incentives to outweigh reporting’s cost: being named as gay to family, neighbours, co-workers or church members. Rape victims have declined medical attention.

Sohan Badall (a well-known creative industry maven who also performs Indian dance in female roles) set an important example earlier this month, going to the police and media after a street attack. But our privacy, isolation and shame themselves, without the protection of frameworks like the Equal Opportunity Act, make it hard to investigate crime.

Last week included us, too, in its madness, with new allegations swirling online that risked whipping up fear and panic and victimhood. But we need exactly the opposite.

So LGBTI organisations used the crazy to launch #KeepSafe, a modest empowerment campaign, calling for community members to be more vigilant in protecting each other. Taking simple measures like texting destinations. Contributing ideas to collective solutions. Reporting. Seeking help.

Few of us feel we have any real power—or even the will—to fix the big political—or geopolitical—problems behind crime. But in moments like the week gone by it is critical to contemplate, as Lorde says elsewhere in her Litany for Survival—“this instant and this triumph/We were never meant to survive.”

For those LGBTI communities internationally whose histories of struggle are better known, like many other groups under siege, how people came together and took care of each other was a powerful tool of resilience. That and the ability to imagine a different world, as Lorde asks: “What are the words you do not yet have?” Sadly, though, current Caribbean LGBTI narratives have tended to a kind of global inferiority, an embrace of Naipaulianness.

“For us there is only the living/That is all that we have left” my own small poem urges.

Narratives of unliveability have no use for any of us who have to live here. In weeks like the past one, our power and hope lie in the little things we do to hold each other tighter and ensure each other’s vigilance.

If you’re an LGBTI survivor of crime, or the survivor of a victim, and you want to heal or help, contact justicediversitytt@gmail.com or 681-4150.

I miss Jack Warner and Louis Lee Sing’s 2012 west Port-of-Spain traffic plan. Do you?

A scheme that had me whizzing to work during rush hour in 20 minutes. It was one of the most effective and impressive public solutions to a problem I’ve ever witnessed in Trinidad and Tobago. Not only did it achieve its core goal or relieving traffic congestion for those of us living west of the City. But almost every collateral traffic issue that arose from its implementation was swiftly met with a solution—whether proposed or implemented, fully or only partially effective.

Old people and schoolchildren fraid they get knocked down crossing the Avenue? We saw traffic lights go up—and into use—at record speed. Roxy roundabout bottleneck? We’ve got a fix for that. Public transportation now leaving people a third of a mile away from their St James schools and businesses on hot sun and rainy season mornings? One eastbound morning-rush lane through St James for taxis only—coming soon.

We joked at our suspicion that some firetruck corruption allowed this marvellous efficiency. But oh the joy, the flow of the road.

And that was precisely Jack’s success and popularity. Indeed, his charm. Jack convinced us all that the effectiveness, the service, the generosity you could count on him for outweighed any slight aversion of the gaze to other accountabilities. The foreday morning lines of non-constituents at his constituency office said that clearest.

The cost of efficiency is a measure of corruption. That’s the same institutional principle at work in the hands being greased outside Licensing Office every day. Over a half-century of independence we have eagerly kept intact the colonial bureaucracy and ritual designed to provide make-work for the post-plantation masses and to simultaneously gatekeep ordinary people out of whatever is valuable.

They are still fulfilling their original purpose of inefficiency and anti-customer orientation. In the last year, we’ve slipped from seventh-to-last to third-to-last for customer orientation on the Global Competitiveness Index, outranked only by Burundi, Chad and Haiti. Systems aren’t designed to work. A handful of people with privilege or relationships are facilitated. And now an industry of “facilitation” has sprung up for the rest of us. Printers get unplugged to drive up the demand.

It wasn’t only service that Jack provided the nation. Jack’s new political party also provided hope for young men and women running for local government seats of an opportunity for importance and status that the various networks and gatekeepers in the PNM and UNC did not. And an imagination they could follow in his footsteps to achievement.

As for the traffic plan, the idea seemed quite simple. The core principle was to speed traffic through-flow on the two major main roads through Port-of-Spain to West Trinidad—Ariapita Avenue and Tragarete Road-into-Western Main Road—by limiting on-ramps to them, and making each thoroughfare run in one direction only: the Avenue ran eastbound, Tragarete and Western Main roads westbound.

And it worked. I’m sure fuel consumption and emissions were reduced. I know my happiness and productivity were both buoyed.

Efficiency has other costs, though, which Trinbagonians seem less willing to bear. It requires putting some interests—including the public interest—ahead of others.

The traffic plan was spectacular in another regard: as an example of top-down governance. Jack and Louis seemed to adhere to the principle that consultation is a recipe for non-implementation. The plan’s impact on Woodbrook and St James businesses and residents were substantial. And their opposition was likewise one of the most impressive displays of public selfishness I’ve ever witnessed in Trinidad and Tobago. It ultimately led to the plan’s collapse, with the South Port-of-Spain Member of Parliament and other PNM oppositionists campaigning door to door to undo it. And Jack pulled it all up, painted over the white lines.

One of the emblematic soundbites of Woodbrook antagonism to the plan was Jacqueline Patisserie’s line “I am now selling bread on a freeway.” I recall that phrase with bitterness every time I prepare to get into an exit or merge lane during the evening rush going west only to find it obstructed by a rack of Coelho bread.

As the meltdown of national order rings out in the gunfire across Enterprise, all of us—especially today’s Oppositional parliamentarians—are called on to revisit our petty reluctance to give up anything for the public good. We are also faced with the looming reality that, with institutional dysfunction so hardwired into governance, the only short-term plan that will rid us of violent crime may be as heavy-handed as the one that freed the West of traffic.

Somebody tell Gabriel Phillip I want to tell his story.

The plan’s impact on Woodbrook and St James businesses and residents were substantial. And their opposition was likewise one of the most impressive displays of public selfishness I’ve ever witnessed in Trinidad and Tobago.

I mentioned here recently how my social media comment about an employee’s neck-rolling at another person buying gas at St Christopher’s service station on Wrightson Road prompted a robust customer service response from management. What I hadn’t realised was that the prompt response I received on Facebook came from the company chairman himself. I shared the link to the earlier column with the station manager, lamenting that my plaudits were buried amid writing that was otherwise about so much gloom and violence.

It is the small things that matter in this country, they wrote back—the precise point the column was trying to make.

My gas station experience isn’t the only example of redemptive customer attention I can easily recall. When I complained that an impatient stockyard employee at Doc’s Hardware in Diego Martin had called me a body part with the receiver still up, his manager refunded my order with its delivery.

It’s a two-way street, too. There’s the supervisor at bmobile West Mall who shepherded my full refund for a service that never worked, about whom I effused in a casual conversation when a friend shared that he was working in administration at the company.

She greeted me by name outside the North Stand at Panorama prelims weeks afterwards, introducing herself, and thanking me. A note had been placed in her file.

Nonetheless, I am still called do dramatic performances—like the one I described on the Port in May 2014—at service counters everywhere, and on telephone helplines.

These usually include a reference to Trinidad and Tobago’s third-to-last ranking on the customer orientation scale of the most recent Global Competitiveness Index.

You’ll find worse customer service only in Chad or Mauritania. Haiti had pushed us up to fourth-to-last place in the 2015-16 report, but dropped out of the Index last year. In 2014-15 we were ahead of six countries.

Why don’t we care? And—as we turn to people-oriented sectors of the economy to increase that urgent goal of diversification—why isn’t this pitiful performance seizing as much attention as our 38th-placed global ranking on the World Happiness Report?

There ought to be serious national technical studies with hard-hitting recommendations for improving customer service in T&T. Perhaps there are, buried on a shelf in Camille Robinson-Regis or Paula Gopee-Scoon’s office somewhere.

But I think much of the problem is about two really simple things. Ownership. And problem solving.

A huge aspect of our service delivery—something repeatedly echoed—is that systems just don’t work. And not just in the public sector. It’s also the huge cable company whose customer service team is unable to talk to its service dispatch team.

Another problem is sheer greed: the big supermarket that hides the unfit produce at the bottom of the shrink-wrapped pack.

Some argue it’s our lack of empathy than enables the cavalier mistreatment we show others who aren’t our contacts. A lack of investment in each other. A satisfied customer who isn’t someone high-ranking is just not something we reward a worker for. On the contrary, they are there to enforce rules, protect assets, safeguard against the customers who are trying to get one over on us.

But we’re still moved to help the old lady or blind man who walks in—it provides us with an opportunity to be powerful by being of service. It’s the self-assertive customer, the one claiming more entitlement to service than her rank deserves, who needs to be taken down a peg or do by footdragging or rule enforcement.

For me, the first simple issue is ownership.

A clear legacy of plantation and past servitude is that in so much of our national work life people simply warm their chairs or posts unhappily for as few hours as they can. There’s little focus on output or outcomes. Where there is, there’s little focus on quality. There’s little pride in work.

Another key introit in my service counter and helpline performances, triggered when customer service reps correct my usage of “you” to reference their company—that it wasn’t them who did or said what I just asserted—is to remind them that the company asked them to answer the phone and deal with me, and therefore they are the company.

CSR’s just don’t see themselves or their role as having anything to do with being part of a team or a product. And this links directly to the second simple thing: Hardly anyone seems to see their job as delivering some solution to a problem, some satisfaction, some outcome to a customer. No one wants to troubleshoot. “I can’t” is so often the answer. “Well, dear, do find someone who can.” So, so often I want to lean forward and add, earnestly: “If you can do absolutely nothing for me, why is it that I have been sent to talk to you?”

It sometimes seems companies think the role of customer service is to investigate, then explain, why the company failed to deliver on its promise, and then to pause. No contrition, no redress.

We have, unfortunately, picked up one North American customer service technique well—the “I’m sorry you feel that way” infuriation. No, I don’t “feel” that way. What I described is a reality, a breakdown, a failure. Not a feeling.

“It is the small things that matter.” A little ownership of job performance—a simple role understanding as being to fix a problem, render an outcome, create a satisfied customer. These two small things might catapult us upward in customer orientation.