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The final visit from the trio of Christmas ghosts takes Ebenezer Scrooge to a future—his possible future if he maintains his current pattern of behaviour. While Charles Dickens depicts this particular spectre as the most dreadful of the lot, it is actually the one who really represents the most hopeful aspect of the dreary circumstances in A Christmas Carol.
The two previous visitations had first taken the selfish old man back to his past and then plopped him down, unseen and unheard, right in the middle of the present. He could do nothing but gaze wistfully, and ashamedly at the visions he was being shown.
The foreboding, silent shadow that took him into the time yet to come gestured toward a wealthy, lonely, unloved corpse who had died without anyone caring, and whose passing invoked little but scorn and malicious glee.
Important to the plot, Tiny Tim, the ailing son of his hapless and kind-hearted employee, Bob Cratchit, has also died, but his loss is felt acutely by his family. Their grief is a poignant reminder of the profound impact of love and loss.
Scrooge had lived long and avariciously—Tim had been but a transient soul flitting briefly upon the earth. Whose life had the greater impact?
Invoking the framework of the Dickens classic turned out to be more complicated than I’d imagined. I suspect this is one of the buried delights of writing: how far a narrative can gallop away from what you initially intend.
A friend, who literally has a world view about everything—all things great and small pass through a filter that scrutinises them in the context of what it means for our worlds—believes that Christmas is a time for thinking about how to make life better. For everyone.
His inherent cynicism took him down the road of listing things that this society needs to change and rearrange before it can evolve into a better version of itself. It’s a macroscopic view of what could be should we start by working on the microscopic elements.
He was relating how he was driving through St James when he saw a young girl, maybe a student, standing at the side of the road drinking from a Styrofoam cup. She flagged down a maxi-taxi and entered, apparently seating herself behind the driver.
Within moments, he said disgustedly, she had flung the cup out of the window into the middle of the street. How could that have seemed an okay thing to do?
The way we litter is one of our astonishingly commonplace habits. What can be done to change it?
We talked about public education campaigns and similar things relating to safe driving and walking carelessly across streets. We’ve seen the disregard for traffic lights by drivers and pedestrians alike.
He concluded that there should be more policing, and greater enforcement of existing laws—litter wardens and traffic wardens, with the power and the will to apprehend and fine offenders.
This is the problem with our society, he thought. People believe they can get away with anything. The harsh reality is that they do. We only have to look at the way our value systems have become so corrupted that one is considered dotish if one refuses to pay a little something on the side to expedite things.
A case in point, he said, was an acquaintance being approached, unsolicited, by a customs officer who said if she paid a sum of money, she could get her goods faster and cheaper than the duties and other fees demanded. She paid.
I remember a man telling me that he could get his car inspection done smoothly if he would pay $900 (the cost is $300) to have it deemed roadworthy. He thought he had got a good deal.
What about the policemen who all had their charges dismissed? Or cost overruns that are regularly overlooked? Or contractors who seem to be able to get work without showing proof of capacity and then don’t deliver? Or roadworks that are so shoddy and haphazard that they create dangerous sites for users?
The country cries out about violent crime, and it is obviously going to get worse. What are we doing about it?
As much as we’d like to keep our heads buried in our sand, we have to admit that things have been rolling with increased momentum down a slope that we have created by our own apathy towards the things we like to call small ting.
We are here because fewer people feel a sense of belonging to their country. We are here because they feel disenfranchised, that the powerful ones—often described as the state, though that entity is only a partial perpetrator—do not care about their well-being.
It is simply that there is no trust in our institutions. And that is just one aspect of our descent into a fundamental anarchy.
The other is that there has been no effort, no effort at all to take our children from early and teach them about civic responsibilities. The jokers who have decimated our education system by removing classes that help to develop thoughtful citizens need a horde of ghosts to visit them and show them the horrors they have unleashed.
We didn’t get here by accident—look back at the past, take a whiff of the stench of the present and let’s rethink the future.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
