Fifty Years On: Williams' Trinidad, Mandela's South Africa and King's America

dont talk to me. dont ask me nothing. dont even look for me. just do with this as you will

Sheldon Mendoza:

"Eric Williams was the worst thing to happen to Trinidad & Tobago just like Martin Luther King was the worst thing to happen to America."

Dean Anderson:

• " I hesitate to enter the discussion between you and Sheldon but his post re: Martin Luther King Jr. irritated the @#%$ out of me. My southern born and bred Daddy who grew up on the remnants of very large cotton plantation in west tennessee told me in the early 60's when I was just a youngster in HS that Martin Luther King Jr. was the best thing that ever happened to this country."

Maven Huggins

• "lol. take it light Dean. BREATHE
  I know folk think that. It is a VERY Complex Story, History and Legacy to look at. There are many men in the story like MLK. Mandela, and in our Country Williams
  
  Men who are pillars who are viewed as being saviors and moses.. but when time passes and one interrogates where black people are in those spaces, one sees the various delusions, lies and denials
  
  in the states, we wanted to live next to white folk
  in south africa they wanted to stop carrying cards as a symbol of the repeal of apartheid
  in trinidad we wanted to work in the banks...
  
  and in all those places in 2012. what is the condition of black people? and who if it is one person, led them astray? that is the deeper question
  
  last week thirty something men in a labor protest were murdered, shot in cold blood in South Africa. Apartheid Much?> Apartheid Still? Even under Black Rule?
  
  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2190989/The-South-African-miners-massacre-raises-ghosts-apartheid--fears-South-Africas-future.html?ITO=1490
  
  In the US, Black people are still enslaved to the body, to chattel living and to debt and prison complex. What is the name of their plantations, even next to white folk's mansions?
  
  http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/America_s_New_Slavery_Black_Men_in_Prison_4475.shtml
  
  

   

  Classic ~ Black Amernica Traditions

  
  

  https://www.google.tt/search?q=the+black+prison+complex&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
  
  In Trinidad. we are not much better, none at all. Just a different culture, the same debauchery just under the Caribbean Salt, Sand, Sea and Sun...Our Carnival is the only consciousness we know and when not carnival, Fete/ Our murder rates. Our Corruption,  Our Nepotism. Our Demise to a Soca Soundtrack
  

  Morgan Job

  ["The same afternoon Mr. Walcott made history pelting that javelin in London CXC was begging Trinidad and Tobago to forget the bread and circus projects begun by Eric Williams. He called it Blokorama, and had a ministry devoted to feeding entertainment to the mobs. CXC demanded our attention: more than 30 per cent of children who took CXC mathematics do not know what the words "perimeter, area, or probability mean!" Yet, yesterday it was Tobago's turn to join the mind numbing hysteria they call "Showing patriotism"! Yet, we must exist in a dystopian reality Keshorn Walcott's Olympic Gold cannot change:
  
  Ira Mathur: "Its sad that 50 years of independence has led to this. We spend all our time on these blogs bringing one another down, humiliating one another. We are already a wounded people with among the highest murder rates in a non warring country in the world, among the highest road deaths in the world, among the highest rates of lifestyle diseases in the world, with the highest rates of HIV/aids after Subsaharan Africa, with among the poorest environmental records ( with no new environmental legislation for waste management in 13 years,- with hazardous toxic dumps that pass for landfills) with a drainage system that's over 40 years old and falling apart, falling on the transparency international index, falling below Barbados on the human developmental index ( we spend a smaller percent of our GDP on health and education than even Barbados). We are a country with shocking illiteracy figures - more than 40 percent of our people ar functionally illiterate and can only read signs to get by, ( to make matters worse we now have among the highest rates of children accessing internet porn in the world according to senior psychologists AND shockingly, remedial teachers instead of being doubled in numbers to combat illiteracy are being removed from schools that need them the most) And what do to our traumatized people? We attack and attack like blood thirsty hounds. We attack an MP in parliament, we humiliate those trying to do something constructive. There is nothing to celebrate sadly. We cant take the achievement of one talented boy who succeeded against so many odds and call it ours. Its a miracle that we have produced Walcott, and Minshall and Brian Lara and Naipaul. They did it despite us, not because of us. Its just sad.This is such a great country. The people are amazing. The landscape feels like paradise, yet every day we tear it apart some more and break our own spirits." Keith Rowley is neither cause nor solution to the mess: it is the post colonial culture of irresponsibility, impunity, deniability, mediocrity, promoted by Brer 'Nanse smartmen, our rulers from Hiroona, men from Naipaul's Elvira that burden this dung beetle paradise. You want to know the leaders of the parade, the harlequinade, the burlesque called Trinidad and Tobago Patriotism, then look to Parliament."]

  And we can only get to these truths if we are able to suspend the myths and stories we were taught/ by family, in our history books, and our national myths.
  
  I hope this helps and you dont get mad at me too
  
  Embraces Dean.
  The best i can say is that the stories we learn and know dont stay the same for always. I deal with that theme in matters of the heart, love and relationships as well as in politics and social dynamics. They change/.Are we able to read the stories as it shifts in time like sand.?
  
  ___may i post this, my comment if not both because this is good stuff.
  
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  • Dean Anderson

    • I think I hear what you are saying. I think. However, my Daddy's and my own feelings have more to do with MLK's "peaceful resistance" in bringing about inevitable change which could have been much more violent than it was than other things. I am much older than you are and am probably "stuck in the past". I grew up during those times and they scared the hell out of me and MLK calmed me and made me less afraid and more hopeful in what was for many a time without hope.
  •  Maven Huggins
    

    
    

    • i appreciate and know that Dean. I am not so young you know. old enough to have imbibed that history at 47. So i know it. But what this discussion allows me to see is that our stories through different times do not collide, are not rendered impotent or denied by another time and its stories. I can appreciate deeply MLK and what he effected and did in his time . I am just living in another wake and so my timeline is longer or changed/ know what i mean? and to speak today's truth in no way takes away from yours...

  
  

  • Dean Anderson

    • I understand Maven. Thanks for your insight and sharing it with me.
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    Maven Huggins

    • and you are understood too. I do know on some level it is sacrilege. that is why i prefaced it as i did...was trying to make light of what i know would be a challenge to read and take in
      
      i am very glad you wrote me about it.