By Linda E. Edwards
January 11, 2007
The Socialist Worker, in an article titled “Schools Report Shows Young People’s Lives Are Blighted by Racism” reprinted by Trinicenter.com, reports that many young people’s school lives are devoid of hope due to racism and poverty. The report, which was first published on December 16, 2006, applies to Britain and British schools. Trinidad and Tobago’s education personnel should not pass up the opportunity to read the article and learn from it.
Continue reading Racism and Children Failing in School
Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar says killers should be hanged. 
I don’t know that Bernard Kerik or Scotland Yard officers can help us out of the crime mess that we have created and in which we are close to drowning. This cesspool is so typically Trinidadian, we cannot expect foreigners to begin to understand how we plunged into the pit. It’s true that many countries have their own crime problems that make us look relatively good. But one cannot compare the anarchy in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in Brazil, or high crime in parts of India or South Africa, with ours. These are countries with huge populations and land masses we can only imagine. We are a two-by-two country with a ten-by-ten crime problem that defies imagination.
Democrats must celebrate and document for posterity this defining and watershed moment in the victorious enactment of people’s power by our Chatham folk. The script of the politics of post-Chatham T&T has been rewritten by the simple, rural, ordinary God-fearing people of Chatham. Their message to us is that State arrogance, insensitivity and unilateralism have no place in the new people centred political order that they have now ushered in. No government can now afford to underestimate the will and determination of the salt of the earth to defend and conserve the integrity of their living spaces as well as their inalienable right to be consulted and heard in democratic T&T.
During the heyday of European colonialism when the colonized were denied adult suffrage, the European colonizer arrogantly and automatically assumed that he knew what was best for the colonized. The European colonizer also assumed that it was his Divine Right to assign all policy decisions of governance unto himself. This represented the parental and condescending nature of Euro-colonialism.
Every Afrikan society has beliefs, ideas and teachings that emphasise the existence of a Supreme Being. These beliefs, ideas and teachings are found to be original with the Afrikan way of life. But, beliefs, ideas, teachings and even practices may differ from society to society and from shrine to shrine.
Forget those never-fulfilled New Year resolutions as the not-so-magical midnight hour approaches tonight. Let’s be realistic: we hardly ever adhere to our wishes because we simply do not have the will, the discipline to break bad habits or to adopt new, supposedly good ones. I can visualise it even as I write on Friday. Sloshed-to-bollocks, as the Brits would say, wealthy men and women with those gaudy, comical (and conical) hats, whistles and champagne glasses competing for space in their mouths, shouting in drunken stupor: Happy New Year!