The responsibility to build

Nation-building cannot rest on patriotic feeling alone. It requires responsibility, long-term social development and an honest response to the communities Trinidad and Tobago has left behind, Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon has said.

In the second part of The Catholic News’ nation-building series drawn from Soul of the Nation—an Independence and Republic Day edition of Trinity TV’s For the Greater Good—the Archbishop of Port of Spain turned from national identity to crime, inequality, governance and the everyday duties of citizens.

Crime as a cry of underdevelopment

Drawing on his ministry in Gonzales from 2003 to early 2007, Archbishop Gordon said he had worked closely with gangs and their leaders, including efforts to talk people down from violence. That experience convinced him that the crime crisis cannot be understood only as a security problem.

“The crime is actually a cry of the nation, for the underdevelopment of segments or pockets in this society,” he said. While some communities and institutions are world-class, other areas have been denied adequate infrastructure, education, social welfare and sustained family support despite billions of dollars in national expenditure.

Such communities should receive the country’s best teachers, a strong cadre of social workers and amenities capable of supporting human flourishing, he argued. “It is not crime first and foremost. It is underdevelopment. We did it. We left them behind.”

Public safety remains an urgent and legitimate demand. The Archbishop acknowledged the reported decline in murders and other serious crimes under the State of Emergency, while noting that the figures he cited were the latest available to him at the time of recording. Yet he warned against allowing an emergency measure to become the country’s permanent instrument.

People detained under emergency powers must be charged or released, he said, and any continued detention should be subject to stronger judicial oversight and greater transparency. “Using the big stick for too long actually makes it less effective eventually,” he cautioned.

The sustainable response, in his view, must hold together two priorities: firm accountability and a national social-development plan targeted at the most underdeveloped communities. “All freedom must have responsibility,” he said, but responsibility must also apply to those who possess the greatest influence and resources.

The responsibility of the powerful

Archbishop Gordon said the “bitter pill” the society must take is responsibility, beginning with its elites. Employers should ask whether they pay a fair wage, whether they care about the welfare of workers’ families and whether profit is being placed at the service of national development.

He contrasted that approach with a model of capitalism defined by “maximum profit, minimum responsibility”. Businesses, he suggested, could dedicate a meaningful portion of profits to carefully chosen community-development projects, linking corporate generosity to a coherent national strategy rather than a collection of disconnected interventions.

The deeper obstacle is the patronage culture inherited from colonial government and retained after Independence. Too often, he argued, national resources have been treated as benefits for the tribe aligned with the government of the day. The result is a cycle in which policies and programmes are abandoned whenever political control changes.

Education, health and social development therefore require bipartisan plans extending over perhaps 25 years. Governments should remain free to innovate in other areas, but core commitments to the country’s most vulnerable communities must survive the five-year electoral cycle.

A covenant practised every day

Nation-building also begins in ordinary speech. The Archbishop urged citizens to examine the contempt and disrespect that have entered talk shows, Parliament and social media, and to recover a language grounded in human dignity.

“Let’s just take responsibility for speaking to each other as brothers and sisters, as citizens of this nation,” he said. A covenant with the country must also honour the real differences among communities: Barrackpore is not Scarborough, and Penal is not Charlotteville, but each has something to contribute to the national good.

He offered citizens a practical question capable of changing personal and public ethics: “What do I need to do for my grandchildren to want to stay in Trinidad and Tobago?” Asked daily, he suggested, it redirects attention from immediate self-enrichment to the kind of society being handed on.

The final practice he proposed was a “national examen”, drawing on the Christian prayerful review of one’s life. Citizens should identify the graces they have received from the twin-island republic and decide how to pay them forward over the next 64 years.

That gratitude must not become complacency. Comparing Trinidad and Tobago at 64 with the United States at the same age, the Archbishop noted that the American promise of equality remained gravely unfulfilled and was followed decades later by civil war. He warned that Trinidad and Tobago is also at a fragile moment but insisted that violent rupture is not inevitable.

The evidence of another possibility is already present: citizens eat one another’s food, share celebrations, exchange cultural forms and meet constantly in workplaces, schools, churches, mosques, mandirs and neighbourhood businesses. The task is to turn that daily closeness into national commitment.

“We need to take more responsibility individually and collectively,” he concluded. “We need some national plans to deal with the underdeveloped parts of our society,” so that within 10 or 15 years those communities may become places where human flourishing is a normal part of life.

For a nation rich in vitality, music, energy, creativity and leaders who have excelled on the world stage, the challenge is to bring those gifts home—and place them at the service of building one people.

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