In Trinidad and Tobago, as with so many other parts of the world, the status of children’s education, other people’s safety, and the rights and dignity of communities are being informed by people who couldn’t be arsed to develop a thoughtful, Compassionate and informed opinion. Instead, the power to shape what kind of world we all grow up and live in rests almost entirely in the hands of groups of people moved by their own frightful imaginations, drawing real weapons at hallucinations, and more than willing to shoot into the real people that lie behind their falsehoods. Or perhaps worse - some people’s ability to live a safe, dignified life in the world we share depends on the decisions of people who are just straight-up lying. Lying about their hatred, lying about their love, lying about their care and their faithfulness and even their anger. For them, this deceit is not a sin but rather the key to salvation, the virtue they willingly wield against those who would speak and live their harmless truth in the open.

I’ve been wallowing in the challenging bits of the literary community I’ve been eager to enter. Most notably of them is the fact that, like any other community, there is just as much likelihood that the people in it are harmful to those who trust and Love them. Perhaps they, like the ocean’s waves, are inevitable, and are more than powerful to pull down those who dare to tread among them.