All the symbols were there: they met at Fyzabad near the spot on which Charlie King was killed in the name of the people and they raised their hands in unity as they proclaimed a new partnership. Makandal Dagga, Errol McLeod and Ashworth Jack were necessarily somber. Winston Dookeran sought to infuse a philosophical dimension into the proceedings even though he attributed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words from his Inaugural Address (“The only thing you have to fear is fear itself”) to Martin Luther King even as Kamla Persad Bissessar aimed to invest a solemnity to the occasion by delivering her speech in tightly clinched phrases. It was almost as though being herself and using her normally mellifluous cadences would have betrayed a peasant sensibility that they may have thought was inappropriate for the occasion.
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