THE EDITOR: I wonder just what it will take for us citizens to lift ourselves from the morass of our current circumstances. The heartbreaking headlines are now so normalised that we barely have time to blink away the tears before the next tragedy or horror.

For instance, before one can fully come to terms with a youngster ready to write the SEA examination losing his life, you have to ponder how the children of the Gloster Lodge Moravian Primary School felt watching a man shot and killed in front of their school.

And we just move on as a people because there is no time to process our growing and ongoing tragedy. When we do pause it’s to blame each other. Everybody hates either the Government, the Opposition and/or every single small party in-between. Everybody also blames fathers, some say mothers are not raising children right, some say there are no communities any more, people of religious faiths say there is no morality and lambaste Carnival and any fete called "Stink and Dutty," the feters claim the churches/temples/mosques/etc are not helping each other.

All the while everyone forgets that the search is on for essentially the same thing – peace from our own stories, relief from our own fear, help for our financial despair. Not to mention the mental strain required to simply exist now in our environment, where so many of us spend up to a month of our lives in traffic to get to and from work, according to a recent report, simply because we refuse as a collective to adapt. And so we suffer.

There is a not-so-simmering tension here now, an unease…and it will blow. There are little examples everywhere. Just look at someone waiting for hours to be seen at a public hospital (especially Mt Hope), or two taxi drivers on Broadway in Port of Spain pulling out their cutlass and knife, or at the Gasparillo KFC incident where a man is handed a knife to attack, but he is instead shot dead. In Tobago we seem to now also see murders with impunity.

But we must lift ourselves. Individually and collectively. We have to. We can start by just consistently helping that one person/family within our sphere of influence that needs it. Where the NGOs and faith-based organisations are doing yeoman’s work, just help, even by your presence. The people giving their all across the social sector in TT, just lift them up in any way they need.

We must lift up ourselves. We can no longer wait for it to just happen.

MARLON BASCOMBE

via e-mail

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