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An honour and a privilege

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An honour and a privilege
By Fazeer Mohammed
Story Created: Aug 20, 2012 at 12:42 AM ECT

It is with an increasing sense of despair that I have watched politician after politician clinging on to Keshorn Walcott and other Olympians like leeches, making extravagant promises of all sorts of gifts so as to appear grateful and generous in the eyes of an electorate, the vast majority of whom appear to be fanatical disciples of the "eat ah food" mentality.
 
Have you heard much mentioned by anyone about national representation being an honour and a privilege in itself, or that any success earned on behalf of the country and the adulation of your own people are sufficient as rewards? Even if some idealistic fool dared to venture in that direction he or she would have been shouted down (if not trampled upon or strung up) anyway by the psychophantic masses, completely brainwashed as they are into believing that everyone–the state, the political directorate, the business sector, in fact, anyone with some material possession of substance–owes them something.
 
But in stepping back to have a wider view of the landscape that could have contributed to such a debilitating mindset, I see that the problem springs forth from the very top of the mountain, the babbling brook of self-obsession developing into a raging, destructive torrent of narrow-minded selfishness by the time it empties into the sea, taking whatever vestiges of dignity, discipline and temperance that we may have been left with it.
 
When the titular head of state opts for a banana republic-style coronation at the beginning of his second term, complete with thousands of schoolchildren roasting in the morning sun, or opts to proceed on annual vacation even with the nation locked down in a State of Emergency, you know that a sense of responsibility to country has also fallen victim to the slash-and-burn of self-importance.
 
When the previous Prime Minister chooses Woodford Square for his own enthronement and then the Balisier brigade rallies to the same spot when confidence in his ability to lead is questioned across the road in Parliament, it is safe to assume that affairs of state are pretty low down on the batting order of priorities. Not that the present occupier of the office represents an improvement, an apparent obsession with image reaching to the extent that every gift bag and teacup within sight of every thinly-veiled political event must be emblazoned with the PM's beaming visage.
 
And then you have the Port of Spain-centric media, staffed in the main by citizens living west of the capital city, going on as if the world came to an end two Saturdays ago, some of them even getting blasted vex that most of the rest of us were more concerned with the last day of track and field competition at London 2012. The sense of outrage that their disrupted little world mattered more than anything else on the national agenda has extended to taking a lag in their colleagues' tails for not suspending all other television and radio programming and going "live" to an event that was as predictable and inevitable as the sunrise this morning.
 
Why then should there be any surprise that people who build illegally on increasingly denuded hillsides, so putting themselves, their families and everyone below them at serious risk, rush to the first available microphone or camera to complain of victimisation and neglect that the authorities have not restored them to their former comforts…a whole day since the supposedly unexpected disaster occurred?
 
Why then should we not have expected that if Walcott could have been promised a house, land, a million dollars, a housing estate, a lighthouse and whatever the hell else, that another medal-winning Olympian's father would have jumped up and bellowed that his son deserved a house too?
 
Look, beneath this suffocating muck and mire of a "gimme gimme" culture is also a widespread belief that sportsmen and women sacrifice so much on behalf of their country that they are entitled to all that we can give them as compensation. Rubbish.
 
Sportsmen and women excel at their chosen disciplines because they love it, they enjoy it and they want to be the best that they can be at it. Not that the state should not be a facilitator of that desire to excel, both from a nation-building point of view and from the benefits--tangible or intangible--that accrue in the wake of nationals excelling on the global stage. But no state owes anybody anything if they have already been given every opportunity to be the best that they can be.
 
As for the "sacrifice" part, the word assumes that something of equal or greater potential value has been given up for the sake of sport. I think my email address appears at the bottom of this column, but I'll give it again anyway–fazeer2001@hotmail.com
 
Anyone who can name five persons in the whole history of sport in Trinidad and Tobago who gave up something that was of greater value–monetarily, status, prestige, etc–than what they achieved or were hoping to achieve on the sporting stage is more than welcome to enlighten me.
 
At the risk of appearing to diss our sporting achievers (which certainly is not the intention but what the hell, people will read what they want to read anyway), this notion of nationalistic altruism that we seem to readily attach to our athletes must be exposed for the fallacy that it is.
 
Then again, this is the land of the masquerade, isn't it?

fazeer2001@hotmail.com

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