We we aren't first world
and other stories :)
February 1 2007
I was looking at a video a second ago and it hit me. I know why we aren't first world or even in the running like Cuba for example with respect to their medicine. It's because just like other third world or developing countries or whatever the PC crowd are calling it we think we can buy our way into the club with whatever money we can scrap together. We don't invent or pioneer anything we're always looking up to all the first world countries thinking that they have the answers we seek.
Oh my god its hitting me, what is our real claim to fame? Our natural beauty? Beaches, pitch lake, smiling people, climate? These things are a dime a dozen most other third world countries have them and more than we do. Relying on them is the same as being a pretty girl who is relying on her temporary looks and beauty to snag a rich man. Time after time we try and we fail thinking this will be the guy who takes me away to a better life and time after time if we're lucky we just get dissapointed. Worst case like the girl who gets pregnant with one baby after the next we are left to try and pickup the pieces of our bad choices with the a new generation negatively affected by these choices.
Think about it. I just saw that the government was sending home the Scotland Yard officers who came here for a year. After what the paper reported as 24 million dollars, and no real benefit this was the latest suitor that has dissapointed our country.
Don't get me wrong please I definitely know that :
What I'm saying is the key to success is honest hard work and innovation not taking a cookie cutter approach by taking an exact replica of what someone has out there and dropping it plop in Trinidad and Tobago and getting surprised when it doesn't work.
Also we again should look to our own people and at our own abilities. Who does America look up to? Or England or France or Japan or any of the 1st world countries? Themselves that's who. We get most of our television from America so it may seem like everyone worships America but that isn't the case. Innovation is happening in all the first world countries all the time. In science, in goverment , art everywhere but America is such a dominant object in our view many of us don't see it.
What America (I think I was going on an America tangent there :P) and all the first world countries have going for them is a brain and innovation drain. All the developed countries suck many of the smartest, the most innovative and potentially the hardest working people right up from underneath us and then sell back to us the inventions of all these people!!!!!
Look at any of the names of the most prominent researchers in the cutting edge fields in American Universities for example and you will be hard pressed to find American names! They're usually Indian, Japanese, Chinese or something else! We are the ones making a lot of the new cool stuff. But do any of the countries who educated these geniuses for years reap the benefits of having better education systems than many places in the US for example? NOOO!!
I went to university abroad and you know what happened when they converted my As, Bs and Cs from Trinidad and Tobago to the US equivalent? Each of them jumped! My Bs and Cs became As and Bs if not all As. And this when the passmark in TnT when I took these classes was 40% compared to the American passmark of 70%.
I don't really blame TnT per say because I know I used to do the same thing our country does. I used to look to other people to validate myself too. I looked for individuals who I thought had the answers I needed in life. I have tried things without testing them carefully I've looked before I leaped but I grew wiser and stronger and more confident. I know my path and I see others doing different things and I make myself ok with that. I know every situation is different and if I want to change something I need to look just as hard at the specific problem as I look at the solution.
I hope I haven't diverged to far from my point but it is that Trinidad is unlike anywhere else in the world except Trinidad. No one in any other country can tell us how to fix our unique problems. They can't. They barely know how to fix their own.
It's like when I was in Miami and I used to ask people with cars about the bus schedule. They had no clue no idea where to even start. How can someone in any developed country have any clue about what to do about our problems. We are where they were a hundred or fifty years ago in many respects and where they are in terms of cell phones and computers etc. right now. Even if the older ones can remember what they did to fix their problems in the past and even if they could bring those solutions up to date, the mix of old and new technology or culture or weather etc. would completely mess up what they came up with.
The solution: