By Raffique Shah
February 01, 2025

When the moral fabric of a society runs into decay before it could bloom, we know we are in deep trouble.

When children have no idea of the values that were applied by our forebears to guide us so that we can distinguish right from wrong, that we can act in good faith to build a country that booms and blooms, that makes living here a pleasant experience, we have reached the point of no return. The young—and here I mean under ten—can only envision a hell such as Dante’s Inferno: they enter puberty and they abandon hope.

What compounds their futility is when they see leaders all around them engaging in rampant slackness, thievery, debauchery. Their hopes for a better future dissipate in the fog of ghetto life that is present all around them.

Their leaders, who were supposed to point them in an upward trajectory, lifting them out of their morass, have themselves taken the plunge into the mangrove mud.

What follows, then, is a lifestyle of laziness that has no future for them, but dependency on the jobs offered by government. They become experts at drawing small pay for little to no work. But they don’t want to work—they just want the money.

Enter the “scrap iron” industry that opened doors for them to become millionaires. They work for a few hours on selected days, then go home and sleep in their hammocks or sit on a barstool for the rest of the day. Think calypsonian Dougla’s (Cletus Ali) “Lazy Man” here.

But wait, it gets better—or worse, in this case. You have those who prefer to go “dump-diving” because that is an even lazier job. When they’re not burning trash at the side of the highway, they are actively removing “treasures” from the dump to then sell to unsuspecting persons. I am reliably informed that even some of their food items are salvaged from the landfill. They live by the quote: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

With money being their only motivation, our youth have discovered that crime pays.

When we were young, we were taught to respect our elders, to not violate their properties, and to pursue education as a means of lifting ourselves from poverty. The latter didn’t quite work out. Some of us studied hard, gained qualifications from technical vocational educational colleges as well as degrees from tertiary level institutions. Those among us who lived by the codes inculcated by our parents and grandparents learned early in our lives that such jobs did not guarantee upward mobility. But we did not resort to crime to enable us to live well. We were satisfied with the modest lifestyles. We lived by the quote: “Eat little and live long.”

It was our generation, though, that began pilfering from the public purse. When Trinidad and Tobago emerged as an oil and gas economy surging ahead of our Caribbean neighbours in the 1950s, the natives became adept at stealing from their employers, whether they were the State or private sector businesses. They often argued that they were not “stealing”—they could not steal public money, but were in fact recovering what these entities stole from the people of the country.

They had a point, of course. Large conglomerates from Britain, in our case, and elsewhere in the US and Europe, did short-change us. Still, we did not complain. As the years went by and our gross domestic product increased, we were able to enhance our infrastructure, especially roads, bridges, healthcare institutions, schools, and so on.

So, crime festered in an environment where State money was used for increasing our standard of living. But it was nowhere close to what we have today, and what we have endured for over the past 20 years. Somewhere in that time of plenty, we got our values all messed up. We no longer encouraged the younger ones to study hard to uplift themselves. Mommy and daddy will work or run businesses and children will get their needs and wants satisfied. That’s where the “gimme gimme” syndrome set in, and the cult of laziness entered.

Instead of insisting that they adjust to the realities that confronted us when there were declines in revenue from commodities we sold, we introduced handouts in the form of make-work programmes (DEWD, URP, CEPEP), welfare cheques, food cards, free health care and medication (does anyone know the current cost to deliver a baby at a private nursing home?).

Programmes designed to bring short-term relief became institutionalised. Like other handouts, they became entitlements. The detritus from all of the above degenerated into a parasitic subculture who do nothing for themselves, but expect everything to be given to them.

As I sit in the departure lounge of life, I am reminded of David Rudder’s catch-line in Hulsie X: “We used to be a ragamuffin monarchy, but now we are a parasite oligarchy”.