The following article penned by political analyst Ralph Maraj was recommended by BU family member Ras Jahaziel. He attached the following note:

I think he is also writing about Barbados culture. My position is that none of this is accidental or normal development, after reading please study the video attached – Ras Jahaziel

Whenever ­Carnival comes arou­nd, the word “culture” is bandied about voluminously and loosely in Trinidad and Tobago. It is often necessary to remind folks, official and ordinary, that culture is far more than the arts, festivals, and ­cuisine.

A nation’s culture is its light, its beacon, its soul, leading its people on. Soon we will see whether the culture that gave birth to the most powerful nation on earth and is alive in its constitution and history will rise to protect the United States against the fundamental assaults by its present president and administration.

I have said our culture should move us “towards national equilibrium, refinement and resilience, a civilisation with standards and benchmarks and which is eventually its own protection against disintegration”. Can Carnival take us there? Or is this national festival part of the spreading swampland of social and cultural decay that I posited 14 years ago as the root cause our great ills, including the unprecedented level of crime and murder?

Culture is simultaneously the foundation, fabric and future of a society. I have said “culture determines the harmony between individual effort and social responsibility; and between narrow ethnicity or nationalism and the larger universality.

“Culture shapes ethical conduct in public life; tolerance levels for corruption; the strength of our institutions to ensure justice and accountability; whether we turn our diversity into an advantage; the development of discernment; and ultimately, the protection of our society from the manifold violations to which we are vulnerable.”

Our culture could either save or destroy us. The stronger the culture, the deeper the democracy to protect our rights and freedoms.

Ultimately, we are all responsible for what we have become as a nation. The politics has certainly had the major responsibility. Had it triumphed, we would be in a safer place today. But, notwithstanding early promise, politics fell victim to colonialism’s racial divide and handed down the poisoned chalice that debilitates us to this day. Despite valiant efforts of some, instead of arresting the swampland, our politics has been poisoned to become part of it. It remains one of the greatest threats to the sustainability of Trini­dad and Tobago.

Our Carnival, touted as our “great culture”, cannot escape scrutiny. There is a predominant banality here. Come tomorrow and Tuesday, we will again likely see the tyranny of shallowness in full flight when our former glorious parade of the bands degenerates into the annual degradation of a massive street fete with tens of thousands “wining” near-naked on the streets, all trivialised, many performing acts close to fornication in public, debasing the society.

This is our replacement for the magnificent street theatre once produced by George Bailey, Harold Saldenah, Irvin Mc Williams, Stephen Lee Heung, Peter Minshall and others. As I have said, the Carnival “has become the great trivialiser, showcasing us to the world as a frivolous, flimsy people, wining, jumping, ‘prancing’ to the precipice”. And “proud” of it!

I maintain that this “corrosive cultural debasement has been eating at the nation’s innards, weakening the social fabric, nurturing generations of young adults who are adrift, driven mainly by pleasure and materialism, so lacking in intellectual and spiritual depth they could fete every day, and with no commitment whatsoever to society and community”.

Can’t leaders see how this soulless environment also produces our epidemic of annual teenage pregnancies, child abuse, domestic violence, corruption, student hooliganism, crime, drug abuse, alcoholism and more? Indeed, do the nation’s leaders have any understanding of the inextricable link between culture and civilisation?

Do they appreciate how culture eventually protects a society against disintegration? Have they honestly assessed whether we have made any evolutionary cultural steps in 60 years of Independence? Have they discerned the profound connection between culture, enlightened law, a flourishing intellectual life and an eventually refined people? Or are mainly intellectual featherweights parading the political landscape?

This nation needs the profound now more than ever. We need our music to stir the soul, to express love, mourn loss and relate with the infinite. No more “hold dem and wuk dem”, please. Will tenderness completely disappear? And will singing become bawling? Please spare us the tramping noise encouraging us to wave bottoms and hollowness in the air.

There is so much pain here but unreflected in the arts. We need poignant tragedies and mordant ­satires enacted on the stage. We need compelling novels, short stories and poetry to plumb the depths and dilemmas of our existence. Ours is not a hollow story. We need sustained profundity and beauty in our intellectual life to arrest the spreading swampland.

Our culture must demand depth. Or, we will continue to feed the children a diet of superficiality and decadence where the loud and the profane, the inane and repetitious, thievery and mendacity will be lauded and rewarded.

And we will continue to pay in the decay of our society with falling standards, daily inanities, general purposelessness, collapse of community and family life, crime and violence, materialism, individualism, divisiveness and so much more. As we peer into the abyss, folks, what do we see? Culture or darkness?

—Ralph Maraj

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