You know me, I like to see the lighter side, even if it means I have to drink deeply from the overflowing cup of sarcasm which I keep handy next to my computer.
But after experiencing this Dolittle administration’s snubbing of an entire community last Tuesday at the Carib Beach Bar, I found myself too close to the action, as it were, to comment. Until Friday afternoon, when I received a call inviting me to a Saturday Press conference at Hilton Barbados.
As you are reading this, you may already have read the news coming out of that press event, which I was told on the phone, was to let media managers first and then their reporters know of the Government’s plans to deal with the gurgling and bubbling from hell coming up through the drains on the South Coast, the Graeme Hall Swamp’s problems, and so on.
At least that was the gist of what I was told, if not in so many words. You can always leave it to the Government to reinvigorate your sense of outrage, even when you found yourself at wit’s end on how to express it, as I did up to that moment.
We have an administration which purposely decided to add insult to injury by not showing up for that meeting of concerned citizens and business owners in the Worthing/South Coast area, who have been forced to live and work with a massive breakdown of the sewage system, not for one week, but for several.
Forty-eight hours earlier, two intrepid Government ministers decided they would return confidence to all by just jumping in for a seabath one morning, and then one of them had ripped one of the “beach closed” signs out of the sand in triumph, as if he had personally instructed whatever was plaguing the area to be gone, and it had.
At the meeting on Tuesday evening, the actions of those two were treated with such contempt that few words were used to discuss them. A mere look and you knew what everyone thought of that political stunt.
So here we had all these people jamming into the bar, to hear some official who could speak with authority on the matter tell them it was really going to be okay, because “x” and “y” were going to be done with due haste. But the Dolittlers, true to form, did nothing.
I had agreed to be the emcee for the evening, not because I am a resident of the area, but specifically because I was asked, and if you ask me to do something for a good cause, I will.
Well, this allowed me to feel the full emotional package on display – anger, resentment, betrayal and more. It was so strong that the vibe stayed with me the rest of the week.
The first person who asked to speak got up and said the whole thing was a waste of time because nobody from the Government had shown up, even though they had been invited.
But he was wrong.
I knew the other shoe would drop, and it was only a question of when.
It is the preference of this administration, as I have noted before, to take a passive-aggressive stand in the first instance when it finds itself facing an angry constituency, political or otherwise.
So, in the Cahill Energy matter, it ignored and ducked all questions, and then in May, at the Prime Minister’s Ilaro Court solo performance, sorry, Press conference, he let it be known that the writing was on the wall for Cahill.
And then suddenly, it was announced in Parliament that the whole thing was off.
But that took at least a year of public outrage and criticism before the Dolittle administration conceded defeat.
But when unsightly things are gurgling and bubbling in your backyard and in your bathrooms and even on the streets where you and the visitors live and move about, I knew it wouldn’t be that long.
But when, and how, I wondered.
Then the call inviting me to the meetings on Saturday came. A Press conference is indication enough that the Government realised it was far behind the curve on this.
To say it was being reactive would be too positive a comment. It was miles behind just being its usual reactionary self.
Even for a Government which has turned the anti-climactic response into an art form, this broke new ground. It was not just that the people had settled down. They were seething with resentment.
It is one thing to ask people to tighten their belts for the economy’s sake. It is quite another to see them writhing in squalor which your own passivity has allowed to emerge and still have nothing to say about it.
But here is when you really know how much trouble the Government perceived itself to be in last Friday. They not only hastily called that Press conference for 11:30 a.m. at the Hilton, but also a meeting with media managers two hours’ earlier.
Was the intent to muzzle the press, I asked?
No, I was told.
Then why do you want to see the managers of the reporters who are coming to see you later that morning? What favours in terms of coverage where you going to beg for?
Would it be that we must all, er, suck it up in order to save the tourism industry? Or maybe national security?
Or maybe we were going to be asked to go easy on an administration which needed to level with the public long before Saturday, December 17, and say what it was going to do to fix a sewage problem believed by many to have been caused, or at least made much worse, by its own negligence.