Kenny Rogers’ coward was just Tommy, one person, but what we have is an entire society of Yella Bellies. We are accepting with hardly a whimper authoritarian oppression as if this is the life of the way of the world. We see teenage Iranian school girls march on the streets for months in their thousands in a country that is officially authoritarian and dictatorial just so they could bare their heads, burn their hijabs, and let their hair blow in the wind as in the Shampoo commercials unmindful of the guns of the morality police aimed at them.
While these school girls risked their lives over a matter that is essentially one of defiance, they set an example for persons across the globe that sometimes we have to stand up and be counted; that evil occurs when good remains dormant. The hidden message that is to be grasped in their fearless demonstration was ostensibly bypassed over here as if no one in Trinidad added two and two in their minds and arrived at a very unpleasant four meaning that if teenage girls could strike back at the status quo with unending might, then why can’t the people of Trinidad follow suit in the face of dry taps, pot-hole ridden roadways, and a crime rate that is now ranked sixth globally and has now surpassed that of Jamaica.
Water riots broke out in Trinidad on March 23, 1903, exactly 200 years ago and while we should celebrate the citizens back then for their muscled appreciation of their rights to demand what was their entitlement, 200 years later, we are still deprived of that most basic of service. Air, water, food are the basic requirements of existence, but now we have to pay for air to pump up our tires, we have to buy truck borne supplies of water to quench our thirst and food prices are spiraling out of control, so the expression the best things in life are free is now a myth.
So do we send for the Iranian school girls to agitate for us or are we a country of sissies run by the mob? In a situation like this in Pakistan, long ago the army would have intervened and jailed if not slaughtered the culprits. It is a form of enlightenment when the security arms no longer sees themselves as the personal guards for those in power but as the defenders of citizens’ rights and their rights to take to the streets to protest against wrongdoing committed by those in power.
Former Pakistan PM Imran Khan is in jail for some misdemeanor – not for denying citizens water or anything existential – because the army there has a history of putting politicians in their place when they forget where that is. Citizens we have to do something, we have to make a pact with the army and police to join with us in fixing this place.
Areas just around mine have water flowing in their taps while in this small area ours have been locked off for ten days obviously out of some kind of discrimination taking place; out of the belief that we are not Hamas people who might just strike out blindly against our nemesis.
Being Cowards of the country must now come to an end. Buying air to pressure our tires is too much pressure, you hear. Depending on truck borne water is something that was rejected 200 years ago in 1908; why are we accepting this as a way of life in 2023?
L. Siddhartha Orie