By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

The truth is often like a wife who abandons her husband in hospital, a friend who does not return your calls for help, bankers who refuse you after the 243rd mortgage payment and governments who ignore promises the day after election.

When the money goes, so does the love. When you are no longer needed, you are discarded.

No one likes unpleasantness and some fake a completely pleasant life on instagram unfettered by such small man problems like housing, health, medical care and schooling. Behind those thin facades are mounting credit card debts, ignored family, fragile or difficult or failed employment.

The end result of years of television now infinitely extended by the cell phone and social networks is the new national motto, a happy ending.

Caribbean governments are just like that with optimistic press releases, smiling photo opportunities and faux gravitas speeches as they announce crumbs from abroad including those who had use of the islands for centuries, and for free, amidst crumbling infrastructure.

In is this deep desire to live in an imaginary happy world with fake positive spins on disaster after disaster that leads us to the uncomfortable present day of mass housing shortage, overvalued real estate to support incomprehensible loans, non performing businesses many years old, growing unemployment especially among the youth and untiring government pronouncements, oblivious to the instant reality.

To be sure there are many conspirators in society who desperately want to keep the ball in the air, eyes upward and minds paralyzed. Some are like cats that bury their mess and some, like dogs, are oblivious if you see anything.

The majority of people are unable to avoid the daily routine of desperate unpleasantness and few are as brave as Chosen Brown to declare that leaders should fear failing the people. Most Caribbean leaders are failing their people, one loaning desperately needed millions to wealthy Asian owned electricity providers, all while consigning generations to live in metal boxes. Just a few of the misdeeds in the new world order of Pleasantness First.

The biggest lie, breathe deeply and it will not hurt.

Like CARICOM, Caribbean vows are only good when the going is good.

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. 

His views are his own.