Let’s play one for SuperBlue
Trinidad Guardian Editorial
There are times when small things with big implications and lessons that could restore our faith in ourselves as a people pass us by without particular notice.
One such occurrence, reported in this newspaper earlier this week, was the almost jumbie-like appearance of SuperBlue on stage at the Junior Soca Monarch competition to embrace and lift eight-year-old Ferdinand Smith, in his SuperBlue look-alike outfit, off stage after the boy’s rendition of Come Home.
As the nation knows, or should know by now, SuperBlue, Blue Boy, the latter now seems more appropriate, has fallen on hard times due to rough living, to put it as mildly as possible. He can now be seen in St James doing odd jobs way beneath his natural talent.
Lest we forget, it was this young man, come down from Point Fortin in 1980 with a mixture of Shorty’s just-created soca with the spirit of the Shouter Baptist, who took the soca to a young generation that wanted to sing and dance.
It was SuperBlue/Blue Boy (take your pick of persona) who best captured the spirit of the post July 27 coup times in 1991 with the first and perhaps greatest wave song, Get Something and Wave. It was he who, with that song, set our hearts aglow once more as we emerged from one of our darkest hours to recapture that true spirit of Trinidadianness.
It was he, SuperBlue, who in 1989 paved the Road to Italy, gave us a song in our hearts to sing as we attempted one of our most audacious interventions in international sport. When we finally achieved it 16 years later the whole nation shook off our blues and danced in the streets.
Now, at perhaps one of his lowest periods in a still young life, SuperBlue emerges from nowhere to make a little boy’s dream come through. Lifted shoulder high by his hero in front thousands of his peers and the nation, young Smith must have felt completely satisfied with his attempt at mimicking his hero.
Lord knows, there is need for young people to be lifted high in these times when so many of the influences are negative, designed really to drag them into a lifetime of hell for them and us. And here is a man, battling with his own devils, with seemingly little to offer at this point in his life, coming forward to lift a young boy high, to give approval and validation to the efforts of a young boy.
That Austin Lyons of Point Fortin has talent to burn has been demonstrated in the 25 years since he came to town. That he cares about assisting a young boy to achieve his dreams was demonstrated by his act of last weekend.
Maybe the many of us with so much to offer need to stop prattling in the background and come forward and offer tangible hope to young people who are going off the rails.
It has become part of our culture to leave our heroes to perish without reaching out, only to immortalise them after they have passed, many of them in unfortunate circumstances. Are we going to leave SuperBlue like we left Independence Calypso King Lord Bryner to waste away on a sidewalk in Port-of-Spain? Or as we turned the other way as Clive Bradley destroyed himself through riotous living?
This evening as the nation celebrates the Soca Monarch competition, made into the spectacle it is today by the outrageous and exhilarating performances of SuperBlue, let us “play one” for Lyons. Let us not just merely get the man on stage as a gesture of goodwill and recognition of his talent, but as a “signal”—to borrow from Super—to action.
It cannot be that SuperBlue should remain without hope and help; many are the instances in which people and institutions have intervened to save others from themselves.
