We don’t like it here

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

Artists and poets notice things ordinary folk don’t.

My late brother, Roger, lived in Canada from 1969 to March 14 last year. He regularly sent me observations on how we humans are destroying the planet. His last email was captioned: “Don’t think we’ll make it.”

I instinctively knew what he was talking about. He recounted the silly things we are doing with our habitat. On his last visit back home, Roger noticed a group of young Barbadians of our country’s Defence Force removing tons of stinking garbage from a gully, a watercourse that keeps us alive and, hopefully, healthy.

He sent this note as soon as he returned to Toronto: “Carl, if people were taught to respect and worship the earth as God, and not some imaginary creature in the sky, we would have more love for this beautiful living planet.”

Too bad if that pricks your religious sensibilities, but how can a people qualify as intelligent when they consistently destroy the very place that sustains them?

As an artist familiar with this beautiful island, from Ananias Point in the south to Jordan’s Cowpen in the north, my brother departed angry and hurt to see what Barbadians are doing to Barbados. “I am embarrassed,” he wrote, “We are not as intelligent as we think.”

We litter and dump garbage all around; and we seem unable to make the obvious connection that we court disease by increasing the rat and mosquito populations.

We willingly inhale acrid black smoke all day long, as if it were oxygen, spewed from the badly tuned engines of mini-buses, ZR vans, pickup trucks and other vehicles; and we seem unable to make the obvious connection that the spiralling cases of asthma and other respiratory ailments are the consequences.

We grin and hear the loud noise from nightclubs and sometimes our neighbours’ homes, well into the wee hours, the altered mufflers on cars and motorcycles, the racket on public service vehicles, the boom boxes in homes, the dogs, the shooting range, the kites flying all night, the karaoke parties; and we seem unable to make the obvious connection that the 800 school children – diagnosed with various stages of hearing impairment a few years ago – are so affected because of this very situation.

So we trudge along, merrily ignorant that we are trashing the 166 square miles we inhabit. We continue seeing civic-minded groups every six months, walking around on beaches or deep down in gullies, cleaning up the mess dirty Barbadians leave there. Visitors accompany them sometimes. After a mountain of garbage was removed from Haynesville, a resident said, laconically: “That will be back there in a few days.”

The late historian George Kennan, upon receiving the Pacem in Terris Award several years ago, made this telling point: “This habitat, the natural world around us, was not given to us to destroy or exploit for our pleasure, or in a mad effort to assure the safety of our own generation. It is something placed at our disposal for us to cherish and to pass on with all its beauty and fertility and marvellousness to our children and to future generations – to those generations yet unborn who have just as much right as we have to the privilege and the enjoyment of this habitat God gave us all to live in.”

Barbadians of the future will curse us in our graves for making a mess of their country.

I make no apology for adjusting the late American satirist Kurt Vonnegut’s observation. I doubt he would mind: When we Barbadians have destroyed this island, a voice is going to come up from the belly of the Jack-in-the-box Gully crying: “It is finished; it is finished. People did not like it here.”

I maintain that human beings will eventually exit this planet, leaving it to the termites and cockroaches. They seem to know better than we do how to survive. There are consequences up ahead.

– Carl Moore