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 don’t care about bigots and their feelings until bigots have that one feeling that irks me - audacity. Every other time, I’m too busy caring about the people they say they care about. The folks who care so much about the sanctity of girls’ spaces aren’t the ones who actually volunteer at girls’ schools. The folks who care so much about women and girls’ safety never attended (or crafted) gender based violence trainings to protect them, or engaged legislators in letter and in person to prevent their harm. The folks who say they ‘actually do want trans people to be safe and treated equally’ aren’t advocating when they’re legislated against, assaulted in private and in public, experience bigotry and discrimination that pushes them to suicide.

Because they don’t care. And it’s impossible to have meaningful, careful, caring conversations with people who just don’t care.

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.

As a theatre director, poet and writer , I’ve come to learn a thing or two about suspending disbelief. After all, my job kinda depends on it. What folks might not know, though, is that my experience in that particular aspect of theatre actually predates me ever setting foot near a stage. It was, in fact, the first time I decided to stop stepping foot in church. And today, after reading an…interesting article by local Christian writer Akilah Holder, I’m reminded of all of those feelings.

I want to open this blog with a question that I hope makes us all think a little about how we engage in debates about other people's lives;

Do you think having an opinion is enough to determine how someone else lives?