Strange things these pandemics. I am not entirely convinced any more that they are caused by human wilfulness or outright greed or just plain evil. I don't believe in co-incidence.
Like Shakespeare I am starting to believe there is a larger plan directing it all. What was it he said? There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them as we will? John Neal said something like: Strong people are made by opposition, like kites that go up against the wind.
This is one of those pandemics that change the world. It already has. And will continue to do so.
As Tennyson noted: 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/And God fulfils Himself in many ways,/Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' (Since a great many bad ones already have).
I do not believe this is all happening by accident. There are too many things: global warming, religious and philosophic redirections, political upheavals, whole populations, cultures, languages and traditions moving en mass from region to region simultaneously.
And it is happening right here, right now, in TT as it is throughout civilisation, as it has through other pandemics, helped along faster this time than ever before in history, by globalisation and technology.
Every month the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights in Port of Spain, partnering with Dialogue Solutions, hosts a free online lunch panel on various vital life-changing human rights ideas, facts and opinions. Serious people like the DPP, heads of Caribbean prisons, trade unions, law firms, corporations, NGOs, students, come onto the panel exploring issues they consider seminal.
It is expertly chaired by inimitable journalist Andy Johnson, as panellists discuss immigration, jail conditions, abuse of the law or the law's abuse of people. Anyone can join in. It is free, streamed live all over the Commonwealth.
This month it dealt with an aspect of business I never expected to hear in public in TT. It had to do with banking and its link to human rights. I don't mean to be rude, but I didn't know there was one, and I thought most banks didn't either. You know, what we learned at school: Scrooge and Marley, the poor house, Little Dorrit, debtor's prison, Charles Dickens and all that?
It turns out that I just may not have been keeping up with the intellectual and cultural changes that are sweeping the world, spurred on by the UN's 17 development goals. I knew that our government had signed on to them (I looked them up; they are all on Google) but, cynic that I am, I thought that would be it: Sign. Smile for the cameras. Go back to 'same as usual.'
But, to my astonishment, there was a very senior Caribbean banker, in a calm and thoughtful manner, speaking about how at least one local bank is moving to implement these goals.
A bank?
Andy referred to him as having courage and strength of character. Which he had, as well as ethics and professionalism, not speaking over our heads in bankers' language which no one understands. He was backed by two extremely senior and highly knowledgeable lawyer
