Award change anti-Christian
If I were ever nominated for and declared eligible for the nation's new highest award, the Order of Trinidad and Tobago, I would not accept it. A steel pan, etchings of our islands, a few feathers, and some waves and stars do not represent T&T in its entirety.
If the Order of T&T represents our identity, does the use of the steel pan as the background of the medal indicate that our history and identity are a mere 100 years or so old? That medal does not represent the Trinidadian identity and the history of our islands like the Trinity Cross did and is not a better representation than the Trinity Cross was.
The name of this island, as we all know, came from Christopher Columbus who saw the Trinity Hills in 1498, 510 years ago and named the island after the Holy Trinity, which these hills reminded him of.
The Trinity Cross was named after this island whose rediscovery and our consequent existence here are due to the aforementioned Columbus and the Christian Spaniard crew he brought with him. The Trinity Hills feature prominently on the Trinity Cross.
The change of the nation's highest award is clearly an anti-Christian move and I suspect that it was not altogether straightforward and in the public's eyes. The changing of the nation's highest award should have stemmed from a call for change by a majority. But this was not the case, as the statistics on current religious population composition in T&T show.
The CIA World Factbook clearly states that 26 per cent of Trinidadians and Tobagonians are Roman Catholic and this is the majority religion at present in these isles of ours. However, when this percentage is added to the percentages of other Christian denominations we total a staggering 53.6 per cent, which is the majority of the population.
So the real case is how did a minority succeed in changing a symbol which does in fact represent the majority of us? Is this a democracy at work where the minority has precedence over a majority? This sounds more like the way the early European monarchies worked, where all power was concentrated among a few who did not represent the majority as they were "apparently" divinely appointed.
Do our leaders think they were divinely appointed? Because when last I checked a minority put them in power. A majority of the population voted against the ruling party but the vote was divided between the COP and the UNC. These statistics I found in this very newspaper some months ago (November 8, 2007) in a letter written by Kenny Supersad.
I once thought that in this country if there was anyone being oppressed, efforts would be made to reduce and eliminate the oppression. This is not what happens here. Instead, members of the population who comprise the majority religion are being oppressed and the Government moves full force to ensure the oppression. Where is the justice I ask?
When it comes to changing a symbol from one that has echoes of Christianity but the true voice of our collective history attached to it, to an empty non-representative medal, why is the decision and the process for change so simply and rapidly "pulled off?" This is but another form of Christian persecution and another failure by the Government added to the ever growing list.
Gabriel Joseph
Via e-mail
At first I thought about about replying to this idiot,but the effort was too much - I don't think he is capable of learning anything at this stage. He must be a duncey.
