Build your great wall

I asked the policeman and said
How much must I pay for my freedom?
He said to me, son
They won’ t build no schools anymore
They won’ t build no hospitals
All they’ ll build will be prison, prison
Prisoner, Lucky Dube

Build your wall high.  Build it high and mighty like your dreams to be better.  Build your wall and adorn it with barbed wire, steel teeth to stab the sky.
Build a wall around your failures, like you paint circles around potholes.  So that people know that it’s there and that you’re not doing something about it.
Build it higher than your determination to be more than just a random collection of shacks. Build it higher than the shame you feel about your black skin that makes you look like one of those lesser people.
Build it for your protection.  Build it to protect you from yourself.  Build it because this is us and them time.  This is after we is weevil time.  This is survival of the fittest time and concrete blocks is the way to solve the problems of the people who give you power every five years. Every five years, for fifty years.  Build the wall and lock it and throw away the key. Throw it far, but not too far.  Throw it so that you can find it in another five years when you need to
Sentence them to five years behind the wall, because Golden Grove is not wall enough and Royal Gaol is not wall enough.  And the La Basse’s pollution is not wall enough.
And after the five years of neglect, remember them behind the wall.  Take all the buses and all the rum and all the roti and make them jump and wave for your glory.  And then send them back behind the wall again with full bellies full of nothing and minds full of your eloquent promises.
Forget proper drainage.  Forget penalizing the polluting industries.  Forget regulating the waste that goes into the dump or at least legislating on the proper disposal or recycling of plastics or electronic waste.
Build your wall because this is the best plaster for this huge, massive, festering, pus-filled sore of a community.
Build it and they will sing your praises, because yours is the only name they know and the only one that matters.
Build it to show the world how forward thinking you are.  Show the world that even Third World people can be hateful and suspicious and racist.  Build it and show that colour is no reason for solidarity or sympathy or interest in consultation for the creating of solutions.  Build it weak like the levees in Lousiana.   And when the storms come and the people start to try to escape, maybe you’ll also have people waiting to shoot them as they try to break free of your wall.
Better build it so that they cannot escape.  Build it better than the mind walls you build when they’re in your failing education system.  Build it better than the walls in their minds that keep youth men on the blocks, their anger looking for any opportunity to manifest and young girls desperate for somebody to mind them.
Build it so that you can escape to your fantasies of civilization borne out of your obsession to be less like yourself whoever it is that you are.  Build it like you built your own palace as a statement to your absolute contempt for babies dying in under-equipped, inefficiently run hospitals.  Build it so that you cannot hear their children wheeze or see their young men’s eyes glaze more with anger.
Build it because they are the problem to which you have no solution.
Make it soundproof, to block out the sounds of gunshots, the sounds of defeat, the sounds of self-hate ricocheting off walls, bubbling in foetid drains full of someone else’s waste.
But most of all build it politician proof, so that they can escape the poisonous tongues more dangerous than any of the dump’s most noxious emissions.
Build walls because, yes, this is what the nation needs.  More division.  Physical separation.  A wall, because even poor people deserve to live in a gated community.  Like the rich ones who can only be safe behind their high walls.
Put in a buffer zone. Build back trees to atone for all the others that have been uprooted for progress’ sake. Make it so that we on the outside don’t have to deal with what’s on the inside.
Build it so that we can be even more suspicious and terrified of ourselves and know that them and us will love you for it.

The Valley of the Shadow of Debt

Don’t forget your history
Know your destiny
In the abundance of water
The fool is thirsty
Rat Race, Bob Marley

The first word I learned when I went to Iceland last year was utsala.   I still remember it, because it was everywhere, on billboards, in shops and bus stops.
When the news of the deepening economic crisis hit this week, it popped into my mind again, the one word from that language so different from my native that made an impression on my consciousness.
I guess it was fitting, since I was in Iceland for a conference on the global impact of the aluminum industry.  We couldn’t ignore the obvious economic advantages companies like Alcoa and Alcan were reaping from targeting countries like Trinidad and Iceland and South Africa.  Countries with lots of natural resources and small bendable populations.  So many sale signs dotted across the landscape like smoke rising from the many geothermal springs whose energy was being tapped as green energy for smelting primary aluminum.
There was a sense that money was easy, money was no problem and Icelanders were welcoming any and everyone who wanted to partake of the wealth.
We gathered two hours east of Reykjavik, a bunch of people with much love and rage for the state of our respective parts of the planet. I told them about Union Village and the animals clubbed to death when they came to clear those 800 acres in the name of progress. I learned about the Narmada in India and the protests against Alcan in Johannesburg.  And farmers in northern Iceland who were promised the world but ended up with respiratory problems and a dead end job in a fish packing plant.
Leading the charge was an American performance activist called Reverend Billy and his wife Savitri who manages his Church of Stop Shopping.  Reverend Billy and Savitri and I waxed lyrical about the shopocalypse.  It seemed a long way away in the midst of all those signs screaming utsala.
I knew that Babylon had to fall.  We fantasized about it and wondered what we would do and where we would be when the bottom finally fell out on the spending and the debt and the conspicuous consumption.
We were hopeful, but not really.
On the last day a woman rolled up in a stretch Hummer and those of us who had lost ourselves in the starkness of the landscape and the spareness of our tents and sharing food and ideas and dreams of changing our worlds got tired again.  I quoted Rat Race to her. She shrugged and gulped her champagne.
On Monday we turned up at a mall in Reykjavik, and Reverend Billy started preaching the gospel of the shopocalypse to the scandalized middle class Icelanders burdened with their bags from the many utsalas.
The security guards were swift and brutal.  We sang, regardless, handing out fliers, asking regular Icelanders to watch what their government and their big companies were choosing to do with their land, their money.  Most of them looked confused, some of them were downright angry.
Eventually they released Reverend Billy.  We gave out free hugs and walked through the streets of Reykjavik utsala signs flapping all around us.
A year later and Iceland, where aluminum is king, is on the brink of bankruptcy.  This week, Alcoa’s profits halved as the price of primary aluminum dropped due to seasonal fluctuations and a downturn in the manufacturing sector worldwide.
One report from Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch said “Alcoa warned that the profit squeeze will be exacerbated looking ahead due to lower aluminum prices, waning demand and still-high input costs.”
Now I see Reverend Billy as he walks through main street America seeing his comic prophecy become reality.  He preaches his stop-shopping gospel now to more people who see that the line between mad man and prophet is not that thin.
The warnings are there, too many to ignore.  You don’t have take on the insane ravings of tree huggers if you don’t want to.  But people better start waking up.  Better rebuild their community parlours and their sou sous and their gayaps.
In the panic of markets and the trillions of debt and the excess of luxury, countries like Trinidad and Tobago and Iceland, with so much for sale, will suffer the most.
With no sensible leaders and a business elite that is not obliged to share their vast wealth, who will be our buffer zone protecting us against the global economic crisis?   Who will save us from loans for shopping at Christmas and loans for playing mas in obscenely expensive costumes at Carnival?
As we walk through the valley of the shadow of debt who will speak out for our homeland security?  Who will mark out a new energy policy now that the rich countries are closing ranks and shutting down all the businesses that we keep tagging our economy to?
Who will save us from selling ourselves short of our own worth?