No.. not the fact that I'm too 'busy' to blog much anymore. Busy, being relative in technological-age terms, meaning I'm too busy thinking about other things and being focused on other aspects of my life to concentrate on typing out my thoughts here. That in itself is a bit saddening to me actually, now that I'm thinking about it, because I have a lot of thoughts that I wish I could log down here and I guess share with whoever would still be reading this thing. And yet either I lose the thought or get sidetracked.. much like I'm doing with this post.
so getting back to the original point, which has never actually started yet: I was dropping home my friends the other night, who are staying right off the highway. So I drop them home and head back out and while making the turn from their road to the highway, I see a woman standing on the side of the road with a cell phone to her ear, dressed in a nice black dress looking a bit stressed. Mind you this is about half 2/3 in the morning and the area isn't exactly the safest (I mean where is except for Goodwood Park?). So in my brief passing of her I actually slow down due to my contemplating stopping to see what was wrong with her. But then another emotion overrode the sympathy and compassion I felt for this woman - fear. What if she was just part of some robbery-waiting-to-happen? Some lure to get me to stop or slow down enough for the men hiding in the bushes right behind her to hijack my car.. ? what if she herself was the robber?
so I drove on. I continued on my way home, with her always in my mind even until I went to sleep. The sad realisation, if you haven't figured it out by now, is that the state of the country directly influenced what happened. (By state of the country I don't just mean the crime btw, I mean the reporting of the crime as well). Every day my senses are inundated with crime facts and figures, stories and rumours, overloading my capacity to cope with all this information. I've always been cautious but I've never been put in such a situation where I felt like that.
and the strange thing is the woman could very well have just been.. a stranded woman on the side of the road, put out by a hopefully-ex boyfriend and not have had a second thought about the guy in the wagon that just passed her. And yet she, and that 'situation' has remained with me very much til the day after and will prob continue to remain with me til.. who knows when.
I had one thought as I drove away from the woman, our lives not to be intertwined that night; "I hate this country"
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5 comments:
Don't hate it Ger, feel saddened by what we have become, feel the fear, protect yourself and your loved ones, but don't hate the country. There is good, we just have to look a little harder sometimes to see the forest for the trees.
Gerry you've captured perfectly what I've been feeling. GirlBlue, I hear what you're saying about still seeing the good but I'm overwhelmed by the not so good these days. And it's not just media hype and opposition propaganda like some would have you believe. It's the people all around us...they're rotting...I can smell them. Maybe I am too.
I had a similar experience a few years ago. A man at an ATM tried to approach me and a friend one night. He was a normal looking guy with a bag on his back. He said first off that he didn't want to hurt us, he just needed help. His salary hadn't come in, he just came back from offshore and he didn't have passage to get home to Arima.
Now I know people who have been in that same situation and I've been close myself. I wanted to help but I felt I had to leave. When we were driving past him though, I felt safer and asked how much he needed and gave it to him. You could see how grateful he was and I still think that he wasn't a con.
I wouldn't do that today though. I would be too afraid to stop a car in the night to give money to someone. That is indeed sad Ger. But alienation from each other is the inevitable price of progress as it is currently defined.
I know I said I hate the country but that's not the truth. I was generalising for sake of laziness. I meant I hate the state of some things in the country.
the 'country' is a land mass, of which I am quite fond.
I think Trinidad has the heart and soul to push to REALLY become first world or closer to that status than we are now, WITHOUT becoming alienated from each other. I really, sincerely believe that. The crime has affected everything more than we could ever try to fathom and not just the crime but social, racial and classist divisions as well. But i still believe there is hope.
but then I've always been a little naive.
Question 1.
How do you think the woman would have felt about your approach?
I think she might have been more scared, I know I would.
Question 2.
If you had met this woman outside of a club and she looked like she was looking for a taxi, would you have offered her a drop?
I still offer drops to taxi stands (downtown) particularly along arapita avenue.
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