The Spirit of Saint Lucia

WORDS are two-edged. They kill or they give life. Our popular phrase here is “nothing eh running” and so it should be no wonder that we are in a state of inertia.

And so when our Prime Minister tells us that our country is broke, then what else should we expect? The self-fulfilling prophecy has been spoken and so we have the largest Cabinet ever, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars we do not have on a witch hunt investigating the cost overrun at St. Jude Hospital and even more dollars on budgetary preparations by you-know- who.

And so when our country ranks among the highest in the world in terms of alcohol consumption, that is “the Spirit of Saint Lucia”.

This good gentleman had a lot to say to me the other night. He told me how us black people are still enslaved. He told me how we do not know ourselves. He told me how we worship a white god and how blacks are the superior race. He told me how those white people were going to space to cultivate bacteria-free organic foods. He told me how they feed us genetically-modified foods to kill off the black race.

According to him, black people excel in sports and black people invented most things in the world. In the last half century, he stated, black people were present everywhere on the globe. He told me that what the Europeans met when they went to America were black people. He told me that black people will eventually learn the truth and liberate themselves and then I pointed to the glass in his hand and told him that the white people left us that and he should give that up. Believe me, it was not juice or water in there and he left me and shouted, “Never!”

Many men here prove their manhood by the number of drinks they are able to hold down and you must support them by buying them a drink. I have not made many friends here because I do not believe in feeding people’s dirty habits. If you want to waste yourself away, do it at your own expense. Even when they do it at their own expense, it is lamentable. Many of our men go to work and when they get paid rum is a must on their grocery list. The sad thing about this is a lot of them are young men and some of them with children.

When women are working away in the house or producing something to trade to bring some income to themselves and their household, our men are playing dominoes and drinking. The mind is a powerful thing. It has the ability to free you or imprison you. But remember the spirit is in the words. If you say you can, then you will, but if you say to yourself you can’t, then you won’t. Our men can take their rightful place again in our society if they learn to control their minds.