Top Down Politics

A basic tenet of democracy is that it is the will of the people that  prevails or as Edmund Barton put it, "..creating a nation requires the will of the people".

Here in the Caribbean, we have some leaders trying to create a united states of the Caribbean called Caricom, without the will and consent of the  Jamaican people for if we go back to just over half century ago, it was definitely not the will of the Jamaican people.

However, based on the "school tie concept", some leaders in the English Speaking Caribbean are determined to push the idea of Caribbean unity down our throats even if it chokes us to death, all because the colonizers had left us with the concept of  the British West Indies and West Indies Cricket.  "

While it is true that the people of the eastern Caribbean are one big family and  this even includes people from Guadeloupe and Martinique because of their proximity to the rest, those of us in the western Caribbean have no such ties that bind.

The proximity of these islands mean that when you are born in Grenada, hopping over to school in Trinidad is normal or to Kittitians, having Christmas dinner with relatives in Antigua is the norm etc, so they know each other and are close family, unlike us in the western Caribbean who are virtual strangers apart from the parochial UWI trained politicians.

For the man in the street in Jamaica there is no relationship or even knowledge about  the people or culture in the eastern territories. In fact, many Jamaicans know so little about the other Caricom member countries that it is not unusual to hear my countrymen referring to Guyanese as "small islanders!" Neither do the people of the eastern Caribbean know much about us and some even think of us all as being gun toting , trigger happy people and only realize that the country is relatively peaceful  and we are like them in many ways, when they visit.

It is the fact that we know so little about each other that makes our being a part of Caricom so counterproductive and besides, in terms of trade, we are too far from the eastern Caribbean and their populations too small to make the free trade advantageous to us. In terms of free travel throughout the region, the difficulties we are having in the other territories are mainly because the man in the street knows nothing about us and judge us by the statistics that put us in the top five murder capitals of the world.  That is probably what encourages immigration authorities throughout the region to be wary of those of us carrying Jamaican passports.

In short, until regional unity becomes accepted from the ground level and the UWI school tie clique can prove to us that there are practical benefits and less counterproductive reasons for us to get closer to our eastern Caribbean cousins apart from it being the wish of our leaders, most of us will never willingly accept this shot-gun marriage.