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Nothing in life is enduring. Even the mountains will one day become dust. Change is the only thing that we can be assured of. As our nation nears the milestone of 50 years of independence much has changed. Some of this change has been for the better; we have advanced economically and technologically. Infant mortality has been decreased and we are living longer lives. Some of this change has been painful; crime and death has become endemic to our country. There has been a steady erosion of morals and the family unit and respect for life and authority is now very low. We must ask ourselves if we are living the life our ancestors wished for us and preparing for the future we wish our progeny.
Mahatma Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world". Dr Martin Luther King had a dream about racial equality and harmony. Dr Eric Williams sought to centralise Trinidad and Tobago as our motherland. Many great daughters and sons of Trinidad and Tobago have toiled in the vineyard of art, music, agriculture, politics, trade unionism and academia to forge the nation we live in today. At the same time evil forces guided by greed, power, envy and malice have laboured to sow seeds of racial disharmony, religious hatred and ethnic distrust. They have endeavoured in many fields to destroy our nation for their profit and have sadly been successful in poisoning parts of our nation.
The people of Trinidad and Tobago are a mystery wrapped in an enigma. We represent continuities and discontinuities. We consider ourselves a religious nation where "God is ah Trini" yet we glorify hyper-sexuality, violence, sex, money and power, exemplified in our songs and Carnival. Many of these are vices warned against by most of the major religions in our country. We preach certain values but do not live them. We are hypocritical to the extreme, standing in public to berate and judge the people who do in public what we do in private.
At the same time we are a beautiful people. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are a happy nation, full of life and goodness. We celebrate and live with exuberant abandon and we are always happy and ready to open our homes and lives to each other and visitors to our shores.
However of late we have began to be a nation that is detaching itself from the national fabric or the imagined community of Trinidad and Tobago. Just this week a lime went on as normal as a murder victim lay just feel away. Perhaps we are becoming desensitised to pain, suffering and death because it is around us all the time. This is a dangerous path for our nation to traverse if we begin not to care about anyone or anything beyond ourselves and our little circle we will fall apart as a nation.
Public apathy sets the groundwork for the low calibre of politicians we have, people who care nothing about us since we do not care to hold them to account. Public apathy entrenches and reproduces the structures that breed criminals, broken homes and selfish individuals, resulting in more crime, thus fostering a vicious cycle.
The media is saturated with articles and programmes about "beautiful Trinidad and Tobago", about a "paradise we once were" and nostalgia about our nation before we were overrun by crime. Academics, police, politicians, religious leaders and a host of ordinary citizens have spoken about what we can do to "fix" crime and "reclaim our nation".
Crime has been cast as a racial issue, a political issue, a social issue and a cultural issue amongst others. Numerous proposals and plans from Operation Anaconda to states of emergency have been executed without denting the crime problem. At the same time we are distracted with murders, reports of child abuse and rape have been increasing. Slowly emerging at the forefront of the national conscious is the startling levels of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault and abuse taking place.
No elite crime plan can solve these problems when they become normalised. If we really wish to reclaim our country then change needs to take place at the individual level and be allowed to permeate to the national level.
All the sectors of our society are overdue for a period of reflection and introspection. How can we expect change when we are constantly doing the same thing over and over again? Change for the better can only come when we begin to work as nation together to address our problems. Every single citizen needs to feel responsible for their peers and for the fate of our nation. Anything short of this is doomed to fail.
Change has also come to my life and it is with regret that I announce that this will be my last weekly column. My columns were meant to be from the perspective of the youth of Trinidad and Tobago and to have our voices heard. I have tried in my writing to lobby for a more just and equitable society for all our citizens.
We have the potential to become a utopia if we release the chains of mental oppression and prejudice, but this potential is eroding day by day. As I transition out of school life and into the workplace my priorities have changed and I no longer see myself fit to be advocating for youth. Thus I am happy to pass the torch. Every person should be able to recognise when the time has come to make changes and I hope that my fellow citizens soon come to the realisation that we need to change our current reality, we simply cannot allow our nation to become lost. We have the power to make our nation great and return it to the paradise it once was.
• Rajiv Gopie, winner of a President's Medal 2006, has a HBA and is an MSc candidate at the London School of Economics.
