Value and vision

July 27, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

Why are we astonished when prestige grammar school boys are today caught with modern automatic weapons?

A recent report indicated that one student awaiting CXC results was found with drugs and a "machine-gun". Welcome to the realities of this here globalised world!

It is now an established fact that every single shipment of narcotics which comes to these shores is accompanied by a cluster of modern weapons for the protection of the "investment".

Once the transaction is realised without any hitch, the weapons are left behind and end up on the streets where they are then utilised to protect the distribution networks at the lowest end of this lucrative market.

If the message that is being sent to our children is that in this global scenario all that is important is "to turn a dollar", profits at all costs, the crude flaunting of material things, the big houses and flashy cars, the trips abroad, fashion and fame, the fetish of modern gadgetry and trinkets, the "bells and whistles", then what is to prevent them from embarking on the shortest and quickest routes to this end?

Once the end result is the same, why will any teenager want to choose the long hard road of study and self-development through secondary school and university and post-graduate work to end up with the same trinkets as the pusher on the block? Unless there is a greater value to life and living.

We have always said that our story is like the story of the frontier towns and the hinterland outposts.

All who came here voluntarily came to enrich themselves, seeking the proverbial "El Dorado’s" and pots of gold.

The hallmark characteristics have been the greed and insecurity of enraged speculators, commissioners, traders and transient settlers. This is a stifling, smothering place that tends to alienate anyone with a bigger heart and a bigger mindset.

In recent times there have been occasions when members of two of our most successful business houses have ended up before the courts tearing at each other’s throats over the spoils of the empire.

In one case, the pedigree of certain offspring was actually called to question, while in the other case, there was even an occasion of frank "fisticuffs" on the steps of the courthouse as an offspring’s penchant for dabbling in the culture of the streets was deemed as one aspect of his "disrespect" and as a result he was left nothing out of the US millions banked in Lebanon, London and Miami by this particular patriarch who had come to T&T penniless and made his way house to house selling trinkets and inferior imported cloth.

We mention all this only to indicate how after 40 years of Independence the children of these old pioneers are still blinded by old world negativism and though today they may be our "captains of industry", they are yet to inculcate the social values and vision required by modern society.

If the captains of industry do not possess the values and vision necessary to nurture and mould modern society, we will merely flounder and wallow in the sickening morass unless some other grouping rises to the occasion.

The saving force is the Public Service.

It is the Public Service that has maintained the social stability between these commission agents, crass shopkeepers and peasant-parvenues whose only purpose is to grab, grab and grab.

It is the Public Service that serves as an arbitrating force and as a repository of all kinds of superior human resource as well as the embodiment of all the democratic traditions and practices that we have been striving to work out in the course of our social transformation and development.

Without the culture of the Public Service, there will only be barbarity in this place.

Not surprisingly, it is the very globalisation process, with all its inherent positives and evils, that brought the rapid growth of the civil administration and the increased expenditure to maintain it. The solution is always within the kernel of the problem itself.

What is amazing though is that there is a section of this population who keeps seeing the Public Service only as a negative.

Any attempt to properly compensate the public servants is viewed as "over-spending" while the madness of a $1.6 billion airport shed and the raising of the public debt in six years from $8 billion to $30 billion is viewed as performance and prudence.

In the mean, look out for little boys with big guns!