Around and Around We Go

I boast about being a Caribbean man. I was born in the Caribbean, and I consider myself privileged to have had this privilege. I have been to nearly every island in the region, and they are all beautiful in their own way. I particularly love Trinidad, Jamaica and St. Croix U.S.V.I. I wanted to go to Grenada, and though I have passed through and spent a little time on the airport, I have never visited. I suppose I will some day in the near future. But I think St. Kitts and Nevis are two islands highly comparable in beauty and charm to any island anywhere in the world. It's a beautiful nation in which we have two whole islands for ourselves. Sometimes I make a little joke and laugh playfully at what I call, "the one island people" of the region, but- as I say- it's a joke.
 Right at the bottom of the Kim Collins Highway a roundabout has emerged. I have traveled on it with a sense of pride. Frankly, I don't want anybody to spoil my pride by telling me anything about how poor we are and about how much the roundabout cost. I know lots of poor people who live in mansions and drive vehicles they cannot afford, so do not spoil my ride around the round about leading to and from Frigate Bay, and Bird Rock or down town Basseterre, or even to the RLB International Airport. Do not remind me of the cost. I just want to see the thing from the air and look down on it with a smile on my face saying, gosh am proud to be Kittitian.
 The funny thing is that somehow or the other I cannot drive on that thing without preventing the face of Earl Asim Martin from surfacing on the asphalt ahead of me. It should have been the face of a woman.
 Frankly, I much prefer roundabouts to stoplights because nobody has to fix roundabouts. All you have to do is keep them beautiful; cut the bloody grass and maintain the blinking road. I do not like stoplights because somebody is always trying to beat them, and on a tiny island where roads are narrow, there is a possibility of carnage, because when vehicles hit at stoplight junctures the hit is never a pretty one.
 The next time I fly on LIAT, I hope that my friend Barnie is the Pilot, because I want to go into the cockpit and ask him to find a reason to fly over the roundabout at the bottom of the Kim Collins Highway so that I can have a bird's eye view of the thing.

But I Want to Keep up with the Joneses

The only Joneses I know are: the one who taught me French in high school, a youngish-looking old teacher named Mr. Alonzo Jones, and I have a cousin who plays football  for New Town named Earl Jones I taught at Washington Archibald High school, and as far as I know neither Al Jones nor Earle Jones are rich people. I certainly cannot keep up with Al as a runner, because although I am sure he is pushing hard for his mid- sixties, I still see him jogging the streets of Basseterre St. Kitts as though he is  still a teenager. I cannot keep up with him, and neither can I even think of keeping up with my young cousin and former student Earl Jones on the football field. So when I hear people with a sarcastic giggle and a  rye smirk on their faces scoff at their neighbours who are trying to keep up with the Joneses, I sort of ask, why not.
 I know they don't mean Al and Earle. What they mean is that the neighbours are looking at their financially better offs, and trying to buy like they buy, travel like they travel and dress like they dress, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with not trying to be worse off than the Joneses. In fact I would recommend not just keeping up with them but passing their tail part. Don't just keep up with them, no, do better than they are doing. Become a Jones yourself.
 One of the best ways to do this is to make sure your children are doing their homework, reading books, keeping the correct kind of company and not getting into trouble. That is what the Joneses  have done to become the Joneses for the most part. They work hard, they like nice things and nice people around them. They are not snobbish, they just can't stand ghetto behaviour, ghetto attitudes and the ghetto-ish lack of dream and ambition.
 One does not have to remain in the ghetto just because one was born there. The Joneses were planning for their son's university education from the time the doctor said "it's a boy". Since he was a kid they been asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up. They saved every one of his school reports since he was in kindergarten, and they made him share whatever it was he ate with his sister. These days there are sisters who dare not touch each others' shoes, never mind borrow them, and the boy won't be caught dead driving a second hand pick up truck that he can use to  make money on the side, not when he can buy a shiny car with loud, loud boom boxes in the trunk. So if you think I am trying to get my children to keep up with the Joneses. . . Hell, yes I am.

The People Who Might Make it Rich On St Kitts

I have always insisted that selling illegal drugs is a stupid way to make money. I do not quite know why I have felt this way other than simply looking at Kittitian people, observing our ways, looking at how we live and function, and making assessments of how our minds work, based on what I see us do.
 Most of us do not know what "a lot" of money is. We think that a few million dollars means that we are rich. A few millions in the hands of the wrong man or the wrong group of people can evaporate like puddles of water under a few days of blazing Caribbean sunshine. So, on St. Kitts, it is possible to have millions of dollars in one year and have not a single cent of it the very year following. Pointing out that St. Kitts has borrowed, or has found a way  to make millions of dollars does not excite me, because it is not the money that makes or breaks us, it is the people who manage it, and I do not know who they are. All I know is that they are Kittitians, and I know how Kittitians operate when we believe we have "a lot" of money. We behave like excited toddlers in a toy store.
 St. Kitts is not a rich country, although there are people who try to pacify us my attempting to make us feel so. But we know the truth.
We are a proud and ambitious people, though, and we like nice things. For far too many of us it matters not whether these "nice" things are of lasting quality. What matters is that they "look" nice, or that they resemble the authentic product and we "good to go".
 Impressing our friends, but mostly our "haters" is what we are most interested in accomplishing. I predict, that given the acculturation within the economic-thinking of St. Kitts people -(my mumbo-jumbo expression so don't worry about it)- what I mean is that although we are not a rich country, our pride keeps us suspended somewhere between abject poverty and culling out enough money to buy our daily lunch from the lunch vendor; go watch a movie; buy some new clothes; take a trip overseas; purchase some multi-vitamins and get our hair done. Money springs into wallets and purses on St.Kitts for such "luxuries" that purport to "free us up" and make things easier, while at the same time making us "look good". I call these: our pride- generating-and-stress-freeing-feeling-services.
So if you are reading this blog, and you want to always have money in your pocket in St. Kitts, look to do one of the following:
Sell food
Become a barber
Learn how to "do" hair
Offer a baby sitting service
Services that "free up" Kittitians and make us "look good."

Inside Those Stained Glass Windows

People think that I should not write some of the things I do, especially my opinions on organized religion, which, by the way, I grew up in, and I mean deeply in. Nobody went to the mourner's bench as regularly as I did. I was a broken, messed up little boy with a tremendous amount of guilt about what I had done to that poor man Jesus Christ who did nothing but love me, and yet I had been so brutal to him that I had played a part, however small, in his crucifixion. When I ran to the altar after a moving sermon about how Jesus dies for me, it was to absolve my soul of the terrible agony I had caused that blond-haired white man that somebody had done a masterful job of painting blood all over.The church people criticize me when I went to the altar, because they really wanted to go home to eat their Sunday fried chicken, and I was keeping them back. In those days when someone was at the altar, many amongst the church congregation felt a needling sense of obligated to remain and help that contrite heart pray through. It was almost like sin if anyone left a poor, penitent soul prostrated on the altar, alone. I believe I wanted some attention too, for  I knew, in some childish way, that it would only be a matter of time before some empathetic minister to the wounded, would come bending into my shoulder, encouraging me  in drawling monotones to tell Jesus everything I had ever done. I was a little boy, so I am certain I made up some stuff to report to Jesus, for as such a young boy I must not have sinned enough, nevertheless I wanted Jesus to pardon me for playing such a big role in making those wicked men plait the crown of thorns that made blood stream into his eyes. I needed his pardon for making those Roman soldier plunge that spear into his side, and I longed for his mercy on me for making him cry "ELI, ELI, LAMASABACHTANI?" Telling me that I aught to be happy I went through that is like telling me that I aught to be glad that my father blazed my backside because it made me the good person I am today, and so I need to blaze the backside of my little boy as my good father blazed mine.

Letting Go

Loss is an inevitable part of living. We lose material things, we lose family, we also lose friends. Sometimes they die, at other times we drift away, and sometimes we must painfully part ways because we have changed, grown distant or have simply developed divergent interests. It is all part of human existence. Are these experiences painful? Yes they are all very painful at times. But life is not our friend. Life has no conscience; it does not care whether we hurt or whether we don't; it just rumbles through, and if we are in its way, it rumbles right over or past us. And yet we need compassion. It is the way we are.
 We are social beings with a capacity to care. We have learnt this truth about ourselves through an awareness of our own need for compassion; out of our own thirst to have the care of other human beings like ourselves. Even the most brutish human will sense, however slight, the need for compassion some day.
 Broken relationships cause inner pain and painful tears, but without it there will be no growth. There is no separation without pain of varying degrees and sorts, but there is also no chance of growth if we do not let some things and even some people go.
 Life may not be our friend, but this is where our love for our own selves must stand as substitute for life's incapacity to love us. We have to, in this world, love ourselves enough to pick ourselves up however slowly, and however painfully. . . . and move on.

Is This Paradise or What?

I am looking for a perfect country to live in; a country like the Garden of Eden was believed to have been like. A place where shame is not known; where I can give anything any name I want and only have one command to obey, and that command is "Thou shalt obey this one command and the moment you don't obey this one command I will give you so many commands to obey that your head will spin and you will discover that your are bloody-well naked and then shame will  overwhelm you so terribly that you would want to hide from voices".
I want to live on an island like that.
 But I can't find any.
 I thought about The United States of America, but then I remember Creighton Pension's bellow that "There is no Eldorado out there!" so I changed my mind.
 Just yesterday I was driving west across the F.T Williams  Highway and felt for a moment that I had landed in paradise: there was no war, I saw no one on the highway with tears in eyes begging me to let them spray some soapy water on my car windshield so that they may eat something that day; and will have to do the same thing again tomorrow.
 But no. I had not hit upon the perfect island at all, because I remembered we thought we had come upon the perfect solution to our economic woes with the innovative introduction of the Citizenship by Investment Program, and when we looked up, Uncle Sam had a giant stick above our heads telling us that our passport to paradise was a tree in the midst of our garden that we must not pick anything off of.
Gosh man! We were that close to perfection.
 I am still looking for the perfect island. I understand there may be some people who can help me find one.

Where are the Sensible Evangeical Ministers?

 I was not at the funeral; in fact I did not even know whose funeral it was. I was simply doing business with a company close enough to the relatively sprawling church building, when I noticed the Rasta men at the church door (Rastas appear to be faithful funeral attendees). I like rapturous singing, and I listened as the gathering of funeral attendees sang along to the beat of a rhythmic, bouncy and happy melody; a musical blend of voices and instrument.
 And then the sermon began.
 Now, I am a trained Minister, unlike many of the preachers today who seem to think they are to rip congregation apart shortly after being "ordained" bishop, youth minister or deacon. Let me pause here to state that a sure sign of church splitting these days, is spurious adornment of otherwise nobodies with grandiose spiritual titles such as bishop, prophet, prophetess, youth minister, women's  leader and other titles. This is a guaranteed way of ensuring church rift today, and exactly why we are finding churches as tiny as a gambling dice in virtually every alleyway and crevice on our tiny country, but that is for another blog. It seems to me that as long as some convert decides to call himself reverend, the government is immediately ready to offer him his "due Honor" along with the accompanying tax concessions for his church buses plus other perks and privileges.
 I stand amazed.
 Again, as is my style of writing, which I have no intention to change, I digress.
 Lets get back to the funeral.
 The sermon began and the minister choose for his text of discourse, the story of the rich man and Lazarus found in the book of Luke chapter 16. My heart sank so fast it reminded me of the M.V Christina. Why in heaven would a minister of the gospel, at a time when people needed comforting words, choose to preach about people going to hell? I mean, don't these preachers do this enough? Aren't they tired of trying to frighten people into the kingdom; and don't they realise it is no longer working? What is particularly annoying, is that it is almost like a fisherman who has suddenly come upon a large school of fish and decide to toss his net and frighten them all unto his catch. I am convinced that some of these ministers become so excited to at last see large numbers of strangers in their hearing, that they think they have gone to an evangelism opportunity party.
 It is a funeral for heaven's sake. Choose passages that bring comfort, hope, peace of mind and emotional courage to the people. Use the empathetic aspect of your twisted brain for once, in your life and try to stop bludgeoning grieving people like an excited bully on a play field wielding your sword of frightful condemnation. This is exactly why I am convinced that the sensible churches in my country are the Catholics, Methodists, Moravian and  the Anglicans; at least their ministers make some attempt to be wholly empathetic on such occasions, and so select scripture reflecting such. I wish that Pentecostal or evangelical ministers will follow their example and begin using their brains to display more understanding toward the plight of the grieving.