Sick and Tired

I am tired of religious sanctimoniousness. Not angry but tired. The way to God is through a very private door, some sage said.  In fact I am tired of many things on this island. Let’s leave the religious holier than thou’s, always a contentious subject, aside for a moment. If there is anything besides religious smugness that annoys me, it is the politically self-righteous – those whose corn beef and biscuit principles are transferred to the parliamentary living room, where symbolic smoking guns are drawn as if on a pasture for cowboys and nothing happens but the imagined twirl of mist in the air.

I am sick of people who think that to travel to St Maarten to shop and to have a car, house and piece of the rock and dollars in the bank are the seventh wonder of the world but who cannot understand why an unemployed neighbor would need assistance.

I have a suspicion that a country that stakes claim to being forward-looking, leaders among leaders in  developing countries, cannot see our own moral and ethical bankruptcy – not that these have any place in our sensationally globalised world.  Well, to me, Barbados is stuck in provincial primitivism under the guise of progress. And yet, the irony is that our modern forefathers were far more intuitive, knowledgeable and sophisticated in their treatment and understanding of fellow humans. Our fore-parents who built this country with hardly more than their wills had less than us and gave far, far more back to society.

We have all the paraphernalia and trappings of the big society – Plasma TV, computers and internet, BBs, the latest BMWs, the latest Mazdas, the latest rice and salt at the table, and our hearts and souls are trapped somewhere between Nirvana, finding our Avatars and escaping the plantation mentality. But what was that film of all films – Avatar - other than a beautiful one? Has the symbolism in it been lost on us forever as we switch the channel to view the next episode of The Vampire Diaries? Has the collective wisdom of the bible escaped us for individualistic self worship and self righteousness? Are we all possessed by demons?

I am tired of the race to nothing. What are we driven by? Leadership has to be imbued with some kind of instinct for survival other than a warped brand of competitive humanism that becomes poisonous in a small society. I am sick that people think that leadership is the purview of parliamentarians only and that many parliamentarians themselves may even have that obscure view. We are the government; we are the people but we forget that power to participate that has been given us by the simple act of having been born.

I imagine this to be part of the nature of smallness. The legacies that we will leave will not be shown by the houses we have now nor what we drive,  nor the bottles of Perrier we can buy nor the cars outside each door – a most nonsensical and idiotic conjecture about a future dream for country. Let the cold axe of the executioner come down on my head once again. This country is seemingly tied up on the cow pasture to a stake with the cow getting knotted ever more tightly by the rope that he tries in vain to, but cannot unravel.

Sadly, we are so artless most of the time. We are letting our country – like the mahogany furniture we did not know was valuable – go down the drain, by crass and crude pretentiousness on the one hand or apathy on the other or some sort of pact with the self that we and only we are right. If everybody is right then no one can be wrong. We all speak about God and spirituality and how to be better people. I have never seen a people more spiritual and God fearing who give so little spiritually. The practical reality is that we clamor for and cling to a hostile culture that is becoming less and less alien to us. Soon, if it has not already, it will become us and we will become it.

When a person does not know him/herself that is a very dangerous place to be. His/her obliviousness to that fact can turn into the proverbial dagger that is wielded against this innocence. When we can see no further than our own naked hunger for prestige and some idea of greatness without recognition of the need not to lose ourselves in the pursuit of transcendence, then we trade away the very thing we say is important. I have seen in the last year a lot of initiative stifled by misplaced administrators mainly concerned with personal ambition. Cooperation – not subjugation - is what is needed to take this country forward. Smallness is indeed a double edged sword.

If I seem to be patronizing, it is that I am also tired of those people whose everlasting refrain is that somehow while we are alive, the positive is all we need see when the negative is staring us right and hard and unrelentingly in the face. Tell that to the old woman who lives in squalor. Or to the child being trafficked in Haiti. Or to woman who was raped and attacked many times over in her life. Now you might say if she had been positive earlier. One of the “positive” things I learned recently about Christianity – to get back to religion – is that it is a theology about freedom and liberation and charity and generosity.

We who so believe in God must surely understand that our human capacity to bear up to the many and nagging challenges we face in daily recession, can severely defy the power of positive thinking. We are after-all human not divine. We are so used to sweeping things under the carpet, blind-sided by fear of being called “difficult” or being shoved aside or less favored or less popular.  It’s time to turn over the page. Development is not only about economic capability or the number of computers and internet access we have on this island. It is about how developed are our hearts.