Measuring Political Temperature Through Calypso

 Carnival and Christmas walk side by side in St. Kitts, but this time there is something else in the mix. Politics.
 Political tension in the federation is boiling hot, and the calypsonian are singing about it. In fact the political tension is so thick that one can almost slice it with one of the cutlasses once used to slice through sugarcane stalk when sugar was king on the island. The thing about Kittitians, though, is that they are rather peaceful people, and this is where the rub is. The people want to feel safe, and although many are angry, disappointed and disgusted on one side of the political spectrum, there are those who wish to keep the boat rocking along at a time of global economic uncertainty and stress. The idea for many is: to live with the devil they know rather than risk shifting to a devil yet unknown. The loss of any government on St. Kitts  (as it is with democracies everywhere) is rather costly to those who have benefited most as democracy is not equally democratic toward all. There are some who gain more and lose more than others  in any democracy anywhere, it appears to be the nature of the beast since it is managed by humans with all their biases and flaws. Democracy is not a perfect system, and any demographic political shift is never without its casualties. We expect the same thing to happen whatever the outcome of the pending political election on St. Kitts might be. Some will lose and others will gain, and this is expected to run clear through the food chain.
 The nation's calypsonians are the gauges of the political temperature and directions of the political winds on St. Kitts. How are the winds blowing? In which direction are the chaff flowing pushed by increasingly swirling political winds, and are the calypso thermometers accurate? We can only wait and see.
 Of course there are other temperature gauges such as political polls which some politicians and politically sensitive persons reject or embrace according to the reputation of the pollsters, and based to some degree, on the perception of accuracy levels of past analyses. Crowd attendance at party political meetings is used, too, to assess, at least speculatively, the directions of the political winds, but people are unpredictable; we cannot read their minds, so again, the luck of the draw is paramount to a large extent here and cannot be overlooked by any politician worthy of the name.
 For the first time on St. Kitts politics, a third party has made waves of some significance. Third parties are generally hopeless whiffs of  promise which seldom get very far off the ground anywhere in the world, but so many things have changed technologically and otherwise since the last election on St. Kitts,impacting the awareness, mobility and the thinking of the people that nowadays anything is possible; including the feasibility of increased political impact by independent candidates in cases where none previously existed, similarly with the impact of third party effectiveness in Kittitian politics. The truth is that things have already changed. The death knell tolls for those who are least able to utilize these changes.