OH BARBADOS!

Oh Barbados! This is our season of affliction and lamentation! In the words of our national poet, Kamau Brathwaite:-

"Ev’ry day you see the sun

Rise, the sun

Set; God sen’ ev’ry month

A new moon. Dry season

Follow wet season again

An’ the green crop follow the rain

An’ then suddenly so

Widdout rhyme

Widdout reason

You crops start to die

You can’t even see the sun in the sky;

An’ suddenly so, without rhyme,

Without reason, all you hope gone

Ev’rything look like it comin’ out wrong.

Why is that? What it mean?"

What does it mean when the conventional wisdom of all the supposedly great economic gurus is proven to be mere folly, and the world plunges into a recession that grabs a still dependent Barbados by its throat?

Why is it that young men born and bred in Barbados can show themselves capable of wantonly and callously causing the deaths of six of their young Barbadian sisters?

What does it mean when naked greed, ambition and arrogance can so dominate our social life that not even a venerable 70 year old political party is spared the ravaging and demoralizing effects of a blind pursuit of narrow self-interest?

But most of all, why did our 48 year old Prime Minister, in the full bloom of his maturity and intellectual powers, have to die - so sudden, so young, without rhyme, without reason!

Truly, this is the dark time - a period in which it seems that we will be tested as a nation and profound questions will be posed to us.　

But in the midst of the darkness there are several points of light, evidence of something good and strong within the national character!

We see, for example, a young widow and her three beautiful daughters bearing their loss and the tremendous crush of national scrutiny with exemplary dignity and grace.

We witness self-less citizens joining together to memorialise our nation's six newest martyrs, and pledging themselves to wok for Barbados in such a way that what happened on September 3rd will never happen again.

We witness self-less citizens joining together to memorialize our nation’s six
We see an acting Prime Minister negotiating the succession process in a throughly democratic manner, with transparency and constitutional rectitude. Surely, congratulations are in order for new Prime Minister Freundel Stuart for giving Barbadians, including Sir Lloyd Sandiford, a lesson in democracy and constitutional correctness!

We see a people mourning for their fallen leader with fortitude, dignity, graciousness and profound genunineness of human feeling! Truly, it seems that adversity brings out the best in the Barbadian spirit!

And so, in keeping with this imperishable spirit, we in the Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) pledge to our fellow citizens that in the midst of darkness the PEP will always be found searching for the points of light.

We believe in Barbados and in the Barbadian people, and are imbued with the confidence that Barbados and its fellow Caribbean nations possess all the resources requied to solve their problems and to establish a civilization that will amaze the world.

Again, Kamau Brathwaite speaks for us:-

"let my children

rise

in the path

of the morning

up and go forth

on the road

of the morning

run through the fields

in the sun

of the morning,

see the rainbow

of Heaven:

God’s curved

mourning

calling."