It will be forever part of the folklore arising out of the 2013 general election that within hours of the incumbent administration announcing the long-awaited election date of February 21 via the Government Information Service on Tuesday January 29, the Opposition BLP had posters up on almost every, if not every, electricity pole in Barbados.
Instantly, therefore, the poles in our environmental landscape took on a political significance parallel to the polls in our pyschological landscape.
In both, it seemed, the Bees were leading.
A few days later, the party which had called the election limped up to the same poles and stuck their posters up, weirdly showing their candidates names back-to-front, apparently so that there would be no confusion on election day, as this is how they would appear on the ballots themselves.
Good thing too, because the mind boggles at the potential loss of votes this might have caused.
VOTER: Let’s see, I want to vote for Freundel Stuart. Wait – I only see Stuart, Freundel here, so, look, I better vote for Noel Lynch.
Good thinking Stuart Freundel, in getting the names up backwards so that there can be no doubt in your supporters’ minds. I especially like the effect when the candidate already has surnames that are also first names, as in Todd Patrick and Paul James.
Of course, the sudden prominence of the poles in electioneering is nothing new, only this time it seems we are pole-vaulting with a vengeance. So much so that the Barbados Light & Power Co. Ltd., which owns the majority of poles on the island, issued their usual warning, but seemingly with more urgency, begging canvassers not to use staples, and if they did, to remove them after the election, as they can harm workers who need to go up on the poles to fix things.
But apart from the elections, the BL&P poles now play a huge role in the modernization of Barbados telecommunications. I know, it seems strange.
There was a time when poles were going to disappear, when all of the new fibre optic cables were going to be buried, and if they didn’t bring you your “cable” TV, then the satellites would.
But today, while new residential developments and public roads may have fibre put in underground, we are seeing Karib Cable stringing up its fibre optic cable, swarming all over the roads like bees making honey. TeleBarbados (now owned by Columbus International) already has a presence on the power company’s poles, as does the telephone company.
LIME does not use its own poles where BL&P is already well established, except to link its network by dropping in a few here and there. You can tell that the two are poles apart (sorry) because the power company’s are about 55ft tall, while LIME’s are only about 30ft, I’m told.
As I understand it, our insatiable appetite for higher bandwidth, as we demand the highest-possible resolutions for our TV, our Internet, and even sharing photos on Facebook and Twitter, has made satellite reception and line-of-sight reception almost yesterday’s technology.
The only way to satisfy such exponential bandwidth demand is via fibre optic cables, but it is too costly and would be too devastating to traffic flow, to dig up the highways and byways to bury it. Hence, the pole solution. So more and more you are seeing BL&P poles with power cables at the top, telephone lines below them and underneath those two, the fibre optic lines.
And below all of them, election posters fighting for a temporary berth on the narrow, rounded space they provide.
Noteworthy:
They shoot horses, don’t they?
The other afternoon I saw a very emaciated horse being led through a busy public road at the height of rush hour traffic, far from any known paddocks or stables, by a boy of no more than 15.
This sight, along with recent press reports about the state of horses literally put out to pasture or “to village” (it seems to matter not) makes me demand from the Barbados Turf Club an explanation as to what their members think they are doing by just getting rid of the burden of non-performing animals by giving them to youngsters.
Is that the policy of horse owners whose animals no longer perform and therefore represent a meal cost without hope of reward?
Give them to youngsters who have no money to feed them and who may just ride them until they literally drop?
Are we such a selfish, fanatical horse-racing country that once they can no longer make it around the Garrison these race horses disappear from our frame of mind, until we see them reappear in various states of poor health, malnutrition, sickness and disease?
Would it not be better to just humanely shoot them?
I repeat the question and I challenge you folks in horseland to answer it properly: What is a teenage boy doing leading a defeated, hungry and, no doubt, ill horse like a damaged trophy amid the noisy traffic and people walking home?
This is not an isolated incident to which I am referring. You can see this scenario repeating itself all over the place.
It is time to put a stop to this unethical practice and, instead, if it is the only option left, to put those unfortunate animals out of their misery, instead of condemning them to a slow, agonizing death of starvation and neglect in the hands of youngsters who are not trained or financially able to look after them.
