NO cultural columnist can or should ignore the world of politics; it began with an argument over the teachers’ strike. My argument was that whatever the Government gives to the teachers it must be prepared to give to every public servant. That reality will force the private sector to do the same and they will raise commodities and services, and it’s obvious how that will work out in the end. My political friend on D’Urban Street had not extended his rhetoric that far. So I shifted and asked why only extend the political activism on social bandwagons, when there were other pressing economic issues in the small business area that needed lobbyists, though these would not be on the TV news or on the front page of any daily papers. I got no encouraging answer, so I physically moved on.

Some months ago, my youngest brought a brutal statement to my awareness from a source unknown to me; Gordon Lewis a Puerto Rican political analyst of the 50s had concluded that “In the Caribbean Politics was the means to an end”. But even more profound was what the late lawyer Vic Puran had said to me in the 90s, while I was engaged in a protest in front of Brickdam Police Station. While there, a diminutive police inspector pulled his weapon, pointed it at a female protestor about 10 yards away from me and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed, saving her life, we moved towards him but he disappeared in the police cordon that enveloped him back to the station. Someone later told me that his name was Chase. Vic Puran was across the road by the jewellery shop and stepped across. We spoke for a few moments, and I retained the aspects of our conversation. He asked me what I did for a living, I responded and he concluded with the following: “You don’t get into politics, but here you have school dropouts and semi-literates and crooks that become politicians and are now making decisions on all of us”. The world that Vic ended up in is another place of rumours, speculations and secrets.

We have the first step to shared governance with the current coalition. It will take time to erase the fixations of custom practices that place choices of politics versus the better thing to do-and the current American political ‘Civil war’ is an excellent case study. The world has also changed while we slept; we have not succeeded in tapping into areas of the national expertise pool that exists. While the technological world is impeding on us, not as partners, but reducing our capacity to become proprietors, while blindsiding us with a false sense of sophistication in becoming enthralled by its tools, which to its minute component we have no control.

The driving force behind innovation is necessity, and the platforms to encourage that necessity has to be encouraged, developed and understood. We are losing jobs through the evolution of minds and systems that are proactive while we are burdened with installed procrastination. The most recent area of employment to lose its validity is the Advertising Agencies, to digital, social media Ads. Options, even government institutions think that rather than pay a professional to create an original image for its mandate, it’s best to use a Google image. Is it laziness or a scant value and casualness of self? A professional world-rated artiste told me that he made more money on IPR violations of his property by pirates than on selling records. Trademarks, Patents, Copyright and the imagery, technology and themes that inhabit that world are the substance of trade unless you have millions of disposable citizens who can be worked to death to produce marketable products. These are the possibilities and substance of meditations that should inhabit any citizen contemplating a career in politics, unless that individual is a plain low life decked in appropriate costume, whose sum of life is acquiring a substantial bribe to build an impressive Chateau, impersonal to the squalor of the untimely deaths of the masses that dwell in misery beyond the moat enveloping his/her existence.

We’re a small country, already drifting during the past administration towards gated communities, though the monsters have impregnated some. The hard fact is that we need fewer politicians and more people in positions who possess an understanding of how to recognise, engage and embrace the creative and innovative substance that we have, the global crunch is not going to disappear. Technology is not going to pause from transforming and dictating how we must do things.

I’m going to close this article by relating a recent experience. We have a historical memory vacuum so I designed a product that is geared to get children to colour and encourage parents to participate in the research of the local characters coloured, that it should stimulate interest in the national self. I wrote a minister, the minister pointed me in the direction of the department that handles projects like this. I met the managers of the department, they indicated it was a catch-up project, meaning that many of their field staff would sadly not themselves be knowledgeable of the content of the project; they proposed that at the next meeting with the head of their parent department that it would be discussed and I would be written to. Several months have passed and nothing has happened. This is where the problem lies. A new politician can’t change that. Attitudes like salvation can only come from resolutions within the soul.