Where Were You?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing?”

I do not know who Edmund Burke was but his words are very apt. I cannot think that there are people sitting in Cabinet and thinking that all is right in this country.

I do not know what more it has to take for them to wake up to see that the saturation that has occurred in as little as one year is about to bring on us a Ravine Poisson disaster from which I do not think we can recover.

This week, I heard a song played by Jook Bois in which there was the haunting voice of Brother George Odlum. He was there speaking at Tim Hector’s funeral in all his eloquence and then I wondered if there will ever be any like him again.

“Were you there?” he asked. Of course, he was making and analogy of Hector’s life to that of Christ.

Hurricane Allen is hitting us hard and the severity is not full-blown as yet and we are just there. Just there waiting and hoping that the storm will pass. We are there waiting for God to save us from the impending turmoil.

Can you not hear the children crying from the future asking, “Were you there when all the beaches were sold to foreigners, when the best lands were given to foreigners, when all the Lucian Whiptails and the Lucian Racers disappeared from Maria Island? When all the mangroves, which were nurseries for fishes to reproduce, were destroyed?

Were you there when St. Lucia was being colonized by China, when our airports were being made main trans-shipment points for drugs and contraband? Were you there when all of our hard-earned money was given to investors without money to enrich themselves, when questionable people were given high positions in our country which they used for self-aggrandizement?

The list can go on and make this a very long article but I wish to end with the words from His Majesty Haile Selassie, “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”