Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

A few years back, around the time when Wayne Brown made his apparently permanent shift from T'dad to Jamaica, he wrote (in one of his last columns to be published in the T&T press) about how relieved he was to be moving to a real country with real problems. (I think that's verbatim but have no way to confirm my memory, so I leave out the quotation marks.) I often recall his words, & did again recently as I read reports on the campaign violence leading up to Jamaica's elections last Wednesday. Only a few dozen people were killed this year—remember, the record for a single Jamaican election campaign is more than 800. Meanwhile, in T&T, where the ethnic situation & the political situation & all the talk about the Jamaat etc. might have led an observer to think the country about to go up in flames a few weeks ago, the sum total of the violence experienced by anyone was that overexuberant scuffle between Orlando Nagessar & Eddie Hart in Tunapuna (& of course the violent damage to Carlos John's pride).

From time to time, like everyone else, I find myself thinking, in a stew of frustration, "This country not serious, yes!" But I'd take T&T's sheer jokiness, however frequently infuriating, over Jamaica's "real" problems any day.