Ah Trini Travelogue Trinidad & Tobago's most travelled blogger through 99 countries. Create and Re-Engineer your life for travel.
I try to stay away from “stream of consciousness” writing. On a travel blog, it’s difficult to follow and doesn’t serve a clear purpose. That being said, travelling is the only true education … You can’t dismiss things that you see with your own eyes or tales you hear first hand. You do learn to question history as written in text books, because you see, hear and feel it differently. Like learning, travelling is hard on the mind and body, especially if you start question all sources of knowledge.
I’m somewhere over Sivas, turkey. I have about 2 3/4 hrs to go till I get to Doha, Qatar. Definitely as you get older, mileage running becomes harder. It takes a special type of person to do it for 20-30 yrs … I’ve barely been doing this for 10 yrs and I feel old inside. The physical strain of jumping from flight to flight is actually not the most difficult thing, in fact it’s rather cathartic. You get to sit with your thoughts, read and just think about what your next moves are going to be. The mental strain is different story … Time passes by and you think about whether sitting on a plane is a great use of time, when you could be sitting with the people who matter to you. You never get that time back.
Over the years, I’ve been blessed to be able to visit more than half the planet, see different peoples, experience different cultures and more importantly, I’ve been able to construct my own world view, free of the misinformation, disinformation and political biases that surround the vast majority of us. Finding yourself in the world is hard, the powers and invisible hands that control us are strong … Especially when one doesn’t even want to concede that they are there. The shadowy financial and political forces have had 100s of years to enact slow moving, terraforming plans. When the food that we eat, is scientifically engineered to slowly poison us, the bottled water we drink is now sold to us with slow metabolic poisons …one wonders who really won the world wars. The Nazis wanted to exterminate entire swaths of people yet in the end the shadowy forces that control us are doing the same thing to us … Except in a much more controlled manner. We’ve been told that to even think about these things is crazy and insane … We’re told that even using the catch phrase “conspiracy theory” is crazy itself and that only extremists and militants use this type of brain washing.
In the end, I’m comfortable with the fact that I can’t affect anything. It’s not my purpose, but rather just educating oneself is the lifelong mission. To be aware of the box, shackles and bindings that are put on us, is most of the battle. Bahrain is a rich country controlled by a very privileged set of families. Money is no object, for those that have it there and to keep it within those tiny circles, they’ve abolished personal freedoms, removed right to say anything contrary to the message of the machine. The powers there have even struck strategic deals with their Arab brethren to quell the noise, along with other world powers … Everyone is complicit in their understanding.
When you grew up in a tiny little Caribbean island, you have tiny little island problems. We had a coup in 1990, and we knew the perpetrators. Those guys are still free to roam Trinidad, even though they are guilty. They even had the gall to sue the government, because they stuck a deal under duress and the deal was reneged on. Only in Trinidad, people would say. We now have a culture of fear in Trinidad … It’s not the same place I grew up in 20 years ago. In many ways I feel sad that most of those growing up in Trinidad now, will never have the opportunity that I had. They will never even have the possibility of upward social and financial mobility that I had …simply because Trinidad now resembles many of those failed economies around the world.
http://www.rishisankar.com/Travel/Bahrain/Manama-City-2013-11th-November/i-58zpZbW/0/L/IMG_5725-L.jpg
When people ask me to describe Trinidad, I tell them it’s very similar to one of those Central American countries … In fact, there are tremendous similarities to Panama and Mexico … There is so much money in Trinidad and it’s so poorly distributed. The rich hate social safety nets, they hate any type of social programs because it is redistribution of wealth. It’s the rich paying for the poor. Here’s the rub though … Having social programs actually keeps the rich safer … So that you don’t have rebellion, uprising, disharmony and revolutions. All one needs to do is “pretend” to care … The rich just need to pretend to care. In North America, they pretend to care and things work better. I don’t walk around hoping that I won’t get shot, kidnapped or mugged. It’s a small price to pay for that type of freedom. In Trinidad, we pay less taxes, have a crappy social framework and it’s resulting in breakdown of the social and moral fibre of a people. Obviously, this is a vast oversimplification of a truly complex issue … We have people who want to fix things but they will always get shut down because there is a very wealthy elite who want things to remain the same way. Those guys will always get their way.
As I end this post … The next time you get on a plane, to somewhere that’s not going to turn into a random drinking fest, think about one thing you could learn on that trip that might modify your world view.
