Dem Say and Hear Say in the Love Life of Kittitians

Somebody always knows a lot about somebody else on this tiny island of St. Kitts, and the "knowers" are quite prepared to share what they "know" with anyone having enough time on hand, and can't wait to entertain themselves by anxiously  and eagerly anticipating a story about somebody else. Anytime you fall in love on St. Kitts, you can bet your life that somebody is going to crawl out of the woods with a story about your lover.
 It is inevitable.
 It is bound to happen, and if you are an airhead; if you are one of those persons who cannot think for him or herself, you will give your lover a difficult time, because these people talk  as though they absolutely know what they are saying, and that you ought to be concerned, and you ought to begin looking at your lover with a new degree of suspicion; and, depending on what the gossiper says, you are expected to do something about it.
 My approach is- I don't give a darned.
 I do not care who my woman was, or was-with before being with me; the past is the past.
 Do not tell me who you see her talking to, and whether or not she was smiling during the course of the conversation, because I am not going to hide behind any bushes to watch for her appearance, and I am not going to drive-by like I am a Ross University Security Officer or some kind of C.I.A. agent. I am not going to spy on my woman. I don't have the time, and I don't have the propensity to lower myself to that degree of slither.
 The reason is this: I believe if my woman is a fraud, I will discover it all by myself, because a fraud is going to attempt to defraud me, a liar is going to lie to me, and a scumbag is going to throw-up on or near me at some time. I do not need anyone telling me anything that I am able to decipher for myself. Sorry. I am going to trust my woman, and if she is not worthy of  my trust and I discover it to be so, then  I will  decide whether or not I am going to move on; no beatings, no strangulation, no eternally-growing bitterness in my craw, simply because I too must be somewhat to blame for  permitting myself to get so close to a fraud and a scumbag in the first place. So I am prepared to lick my wound, swallow my pride and hope for better luck next time.
 If my relationship breaks up, it won't be caused by what any gossip would have brought me. It would be out of something that I would have discovered  all on my own, and even then, there will be an open, accessible door of reconciliation, because nobody who cares about somebody is readily going to walk away without some form of plea for forgiveness and a second chance. I alone must decide based on my own judgment of the circumstances with which I am personally familiar.
 People break up relationships only when one of the parties in that relationship believes that the gossip has all of his or her facts properly lined up. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't, but I am the one who is at liberty to decide whether or not the facts, presented to me, matter at all or  matter sufficiently for me to either walk away or try to work things through.
There are people who think that because someone is cheating they should walk away. There are others who think they should not, and there is nothing wrong if the person decides to stay and  work with the good and the not-so-good aspects of the relationship. There are those who think their relationship should end because she or he is too friendly with an ex, others believe its absolutely nothing.
 Relationships are bundles of internal and external physical, emotional and psychological struggles, habits, conditioning,history, bonds, reflections, memories, fears, doubts, secrets, certainties and uncertainties; it's  a whole tangle of things and matters to muddle through. When a man and a woman come together, they are two totally different personalities trying to muddle through stuff- lots of stuff-. If I am a big talker, and I fall in love with someone who is not, I must not think that she is certainly changing or falling out of love with me, or that she never really loved me in the first place, because I told her I loved her ten times in the course of a single day, but she only told me she loved me once throughout the course of that same day, so something must be wrong. I cannot allow myself to feel that she  must not  any longer  be as interested in me as she was before, because I texted her a twenty-five word message, but she responded by texting only two words and they were not terms of endearment.
 There are people who make major issues out of  these simple matters, and there are many people out there who manage their relationships along ways you would not be caught dead doing. Some of these people are friends, acquaintances and family who think that because they won't permit their women or men to do certain things, or behave in certain ways, or associate with certain individuals, that you must not permit it either, and so this is when they come to you with dem say and hear say. You will be a fool if you let them make you lose the joy of your relationship because of their propensity to measure your way of managing yourself in your relationship, by the way they manage themselves in theirs.
 Do not take on the Dem say and hear say, because you are not dem and dem most certainly ain't you.

Whose Cat?

I am firmly of the view that the way a society treats its animals is a true reflection of its levels of civility. If someone treats an animal badly, he or she is an uncivilized brute. So I am pleased when I see more and more young women, particularly, transporting, petting and hugging dogs and cats. These animals mean the world to them. They spend money on them and take them to the vet. It could be because they are disgusted and fed up with the behavior of human males, but whatever the cause, it is  heartening to see a society indicating a move toward higher levels of  civility, at least among the women, as demonstrated by the relative increase in humaneness to animals, displayed through clear interest in quality of care given to our fellow creatures. I still see stupid males  tugging pit-bull terriers by chains weighing nearly a thousand pounds around the neck while being compelled along beside bicycles sometimes over very long distances, because they "think" this is how they strengthen these animals for fighting. This is brutish and wicked, but I guess we will never be able to completely free, free-societies of this type of scum.
 But I can't help thinking as I drive along the nation's highways that I must keep a lookout for the nation's next dead cat. I see other dead things too, but it's the cats that get my attention, because my imagination tells me that these cats were trying to get home to somebody who prepared a  container of cat-food for them. I just cannot assume that the dead cat whose entrails  splatt amidst merciless, squelching rubber of car and jeep tires did not belong to a little girl at home waiting, calling and longing for her "blackie" or "shezie" to come home. That little girl now has to go to school and try to concentrate. So when I have a near miss of a cat on the road I am pleased. I instinctively move my foot to the brake peddle. I cannot help it, because I want all animals in the federation to get home.

Without Government

Our fore parents had no one to give them anything. Most of us on St. Kitts Nevis came through ancestors who were brought to this part of the world against their will. No one gave them anything. The colonizers took what they had, including their energy,away from them. Somehow, through their own initiatives they made use of opportunities that came their way and ended up owning property.
 I grew up in a home that my father and mother owned, inherited from his father who built it. This is the story of many persons of my generation. Today things have changed. Our young people inherit nothing because their parents do not own anything. The houses they live in belong to the banks. I have learned not to envy people for what they appear to have, because it is clear to me, that, were they to lose their jobs tomorrow we will then see what they really and truly own.
But whose fault is it that we own nothing? Why have we arrived at a position at which we bow before parliamentarians, begging, pleading butt-kissing for a grudgingly tiny piece of land somewhere, only to be told "you are on file"? Why are our children  "on file" when most of their parents grew up in houses that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents owned in Mc. Knight, Up De village, in New Town and Down Camps?
Why?
Take fort instance, my family still has a house that all nine of us grew up in on Thibou Avenue in Mc. Knight, but all of us who now happen to own property were once "on file". Could we have gotten property without going to government for anything? Yes, we could have, but it would have meant putting our resources together. It would have meant coming together as a family and saying to each other: look, daddy and mommy left this house for all of us. Let us get together and do something with it. Let us not go into any debt to owe the bank for thirty year mortgages. let us come together, for the land is big enough for each of us to have our own space in this place so that we can save our resources instead of paying either years of rent or years of mortgage, and in so doing we will be able to have enough money to send our sons and daughters to college without having to borrow so much money for them to go be engineers, doctors,  and specialists in the fields of their choice. Instead of doing this most of us are bowing down to government officials, pleading with them to please permit us to have a piece of the land  that we were born in, with a prayer and a hope that they will get to our "file" before the government changes.

Playing with Money ( Part 2)

Relative to the population of the Caribbean specifically, and the world generally, investing in the stock exchange and the other forms of  opportunity available across the globe is done by a small number of persons. There are over seven billion people in the world, the vast majority of whom know nothing of these high-end types of investments. Most Caribbean people understand little or nothing about the stock exchange, and most of us think it is a completely foreign world in which we could not survive even if we harbored a remote interest. This perspective is not going to change any time soon although I suspect we will grow out of it in about fifty years.
 In the Caribbean money is for fun things. Money is used to assist us in acquiring and doing things that make us "feel good". On St. Kitts the slogan is "tek you money worth"; what this means is that you should spend your money to have fun and as much of it as your money is able to get you. When the money is gone it does not matter as long as you had a grand time. Not being able to pay your bills the following day does not matter. You are quite content sleeping on the pavement as long as you had "a good time" getting there. This is the attitude of  too many in the Caribbean. Money is for having "a good time", after all, we are often heard to say, we only have one life to live, and we may as well have a great party living it.
 Caribbean people have great talent, and any talent can be morphed into hard cash. The region is full of great vocalists, musicians, athletes, dancers, dressmakers; name the talent and it is here under the Caribbean sun. Why then are we so poor? It is certainly not for the want of the ability to make money. It is because we see money as a plaything. We do not think  of ways to take little money and grow it. Our bank and credit union loans are for complete consumption. We think that our daughter's singing in the bathroom is the furthest she can reach, and that we have a right to demand a raise of salary because we have "worked here long".This types of thinking is based on the idea that we cannot do anything to invest in our own opportunities and in ourselves. We think that we must be "discovered" because we see people being "discovered" on television. We do not know what to do with what we have, and so we play with it all.
We may not be a wealthy area of the world, but we do not have to be as destitute as we are, and one of the biggest perpetrators of poverty in the Caribbean region is our propensity to elect politicians whose vision cannot take them beyond the Caribbean preference for part-time.

Playing With Money (part 1)

I watch people play with money all the time. I see them down by the ferry terminal on St.Kitts in broad daylight playing with money in the open air surrounded by spectators. A few years ago that would never have happened. The money players would have had to hide to "play" with their or other people's money, but now nearly every street corner is an open casino, and nobody is doing anything about it, and I don't really know if anybody should.
 Money is scarce, as scarce as it has ever been, and yet it is not scarce.
 Paradoxical?
 Money does not dry up like water on a steamy day once it has been manufactured. It is out there somewhere floating around. Much of it is in the hands of the people who understand how to get it, and much of it is in the hands of many who don't know how they got it. Gamblers like those at the ferry terminal understand it the least of all people. They have no clue how it's made, where it came from, how they got it, how the people they "win" it from got, it and if they are going to have any of it the following moment, never mind the following day.
 There is money out there.
Lots of it.
Tons and tons of it.
But it's those who don't seek it who won't find it. It is those who blow it who won't have much or any of it, and frankly those who think they have enough of it never do have enough of it because money is a funny thing. It attracts loafers. If you are suspected of having lots of it, people expect you to give them some of what you have, because they suspect you got it from them somehow or the other. So if you have a lot of it and you don't seem to be able to show that you are giving any of it away, you attract haters and enemies who may try to knock you down and take it from you. The love of money is the root of evil, not so much because the man or woman who "loves" it practices evil, but because  it is often at the root cause of why evil people try to kill for it if, to them, you appear to understand how to use it to acquire a nice car, or build a nice home, or even two homes with gardens that you  seem able to pay someone to maintain.
 There is nothing wrong with having lots of money, but there is something about having money that attracts evil people to those who seem to know how to earn or acquire it. There is money out there and the least among us can certainly have more of it. Note, I did not say get rich with it. I said we can have more of it.




 Follow for part 2 of this opinion piece.

Believe Me Age is Really Just a Number

We hear it all the time, especially from young people, particularly young women who admire older men and from older women who have eyes for younger men.
These days the older women are looking better than ever in the history of the Caribbean, it seems to me. No longer are they hazarding their health and their physical appearance by getting volumes of little babies. They are educating themselves and making time for the gym. Granted, many of them are not really losing the weight, because if there is one thing we do not lack in the Caribbean it's food, and lots of it; and the women are cooking it. So this idea of walking the hills and highways for the purpose of losing weight is a fallacy. Caribbean women love little children around them, and anywhere there are little children, there will be fattening, sweet foods, which these women are cajoled to indulge the children in, otherwise they are in for harassment and actual competitive analysis by the children they adore concerning which of the aunties is the nicer one, and the nicer one is the one who lets them have the ice cream and the pizza which they want you- yes- you, the walker-across-the-highway, to taste and see how good it is. And if you taste Jacquille's ice cream and you do not taste Shaquille's ice cream, you are losing the favor battle. So do not tell me that you are walking the FT Williams Highway, The Garrison or  The Savannah to lose weight; not in the West Indies and not if you are woman.
 But as usual I ramble and I love it.
 The women are looking good no matter the age. Age is no longer a factor in love or anything else as long as persons are sane and adult. What matters is:
 what do you possess?
 Where are you going?
Where can we go together in life and where can you take me?
 These are the things that matter to the people of this age, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It makes no sense being with someone who is the "correct" age but can take you nowhere in life; can do nothing for you, but when he or she dies (which today has nothing to do with age) leaves you with nothing but abject poverty and headache.
 Of course there are older people who have been just as unambitious as the young, and this is why I say age is just a number whether you are old or young.
 What matters more than anything else is not how old you are, but who you are. What type of person are you. what stuff are you comprised and composed of. What type of temperament are you inundated with and what qualities and ambitions have you demonstrated. If you get an A for quality as an individual,  someone who gets to know you won't even remember your age. All you need to do (if a younger individual finds you appealing and you permit that individual into your life) is hope to God that the persons stays around when you begin to drivel.

Don't Have to be a Stupid Teenager

There are some people who think that being a teenager and being stupid are inseparable things. I do not believe so. Put another way, what I believe is that being a teenager and being stupid do not necessarily have to go together. You can be a teenager and be sensible, wise and good if you want to be.
 I am quite aware that there are all sorts of scientific and psychological profiles about teenage behavior today, and much of the nonsense or stupidness teenagers do are attributed to the not-yet completely-developed status of the teenage brain. They tell me that as a teenager, the brain waves do not work in sensible ways; they are not fully connected ( am putting it my way, here) and that the wiring inside the teenage brain is not fully complete as yet, and so they will do nonsense.
 I agree.
I don't know, but it does definitely appear that there is something wrong or incomplete in the teenager's head. It appears that way to every parent I know. They can't wait for their teenager's brain to complete its wiring, because this partly-complete teenage brain wiring causes parents much stress, and work, and shouting, and argument and demand. Much putting down of the foot and its accompanying slammed door of teenage bedrooms; and these days it is the defiant insertion of the ever-present earplug.
It is possible to be a teenager and be absolutely respectful to parents, to avoid being a thief, to have excellent company, enjoy clean, safe fun and still fully enjoy your teenage years. Don't get me wrong, teenage years carry their stresses. I am aware that there are actual chemicals generated by the human body that do unimaginable things to the teenage emotions. I don't question that at all, but what I am saying is that teenage and stupid don't necessarily have to co-exist. If you have unprotected sex you will get a disease. If you steal, you will get caught and go to jail embarrassing your parents, if not yourself, because the embarrassment "wiring" has not yet been supplied to your brain. If you refuse to exercise self-control and self-restraint you could wind up dead, and if you do not discipline yourself, buckle down and do your school work in and outside of the classroom, you could end up in a financial dead end for the balance of your life, giving your own children a terrible beginning on their path through their existence. Your stupid fault.
 I know that the psychologist may inform me that, that aspect of the reasoning capacity "wiring" has not yet reached the teenage brain, but I  believe it is there. It is just that too many teenagers have not been helped by their parents in locating it.