Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 05/Jan 04:17

Dead lines

Attillah Springer’s words in the New York Times article on our state of emergency were heartening. They were dread words, and yet there was more hope to be gleaned from them than most other things I read. She said, amongst other things (and I paraphrase here), that innocent young black men will inevitably get caught in the net that the SoE intends to cast for criminals. I appreciate this because Springer did not start caring about at-risk youth yesterday. She did not set her gaze on them on the day Stuart Young had to be the government’s grown-up and face the country with a sheaf of baffling notes. She has been concerned and active in this area no matter the party in power, no matter the prime minister, no matter the weather. She has been consistent. Shocking to myself as I find this, I’m starting to feel sorry for Mr Young. He may turn out to be the only MVP any government has had the privilege to nominate in all the governments I’ve seen in my lifetime. Whether he does it well or not, he goes out and does whatever needs to be done when no one else wants to. I’m sure someone had a decent year in 2024, but I don’t know them. I’m happy for them and I wish them more of the same this year. Everyone I can think of had a wretched time last year. I will think of it as the year the deadlines really came for me. I spent so much time keeping my deadlines under control I lost sight of things like headlines, percentages and the suspension of disbelief. It's true. When you can’t see the forest for the projects and there’s no time to go to the grocery let alone an arboreal retreat, you can really lose your imagination and become – shudder – literal. Last year, surrounded by death, near-death and pestilence, all I could see was what was in front of me and take it at face value. It was not fun. During the Stuart Young Show, there was repeated use of the term “public health” or “public health concern.” I’m as fond of our Minister of National Security as the next person, but when Mr Hinds kept going on about treating the SoE as a public health concern, I grew concerned. It’s like when someone says not to worry about them and you immediately go into panic mode. I know what he was saying. Crime, criminals, gangs, guns, the whole lot of it adds up to a great scourge upon the land. He referred to an epidemic. He’s not wrong about one thing in particular: we are all sick of it. But I wish he was being literal. Because if that were so, then the science that surrounds public health could swiftly be put into play for the good of the country. This is a gargantuan and really underappreciated discipline and the more I look at it, the more I see that what it is could do us all a world of good. In public health we’d be concerned with improving communication. No more random acts of alarm, but well-developed plans to disseminate information for healthy communities. How to be healthy. How to get healthy. What healthy looks like. Policy and decision-making would have a scientific basis. I don’t mean the ministers and aides would all go into a lab (though some seem to have emerged from one), but there would be rigour and guides to planning. Am I saying those do not exist now? I don’t have proof one way or another. And that is frightening. If we were treating this as a public health issue, from what I understand, there should be an effort to help those in need. Services and the like. I’m guessing that might be food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, medical attention when someone is bleeding out and you’re standing over them waiting for no-ambulance, making sure they don’t escape. “Public health concern” is a boss diversion idea. Except when it’s not because some dolt gets all excited, takes it literally and starts to fantasise about how that could really work if you applied it appropriately. But while I’m dreaming about efficacy and accountability and other mythical concepts about which I’ve heard, real people in the real country in which I live are being murdered like we’re living in a Marlon James novel. I want us to get better. I wish this really were a public health crisis. The post Dead lines appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.