Trinidad and Tobago: Don’t Fall for Divide and Conquer — Our Peace Zone Is Not a War Zone

History shows how small nations are destabilized through division, and Trinidad and Tobago now faces a moment demanding clarity, unity, and national stewardship.

Grace Caroline Walker
Grace Notes

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Trinidad and Tobago — in case you missed it — Trinbagonians near and far, on land, sea, and sky, are holding space: in prayer, in advocacy, and in stewardship, as we traverse perilous escapades with a United States posture that feels increasingly insistent on turning our Peace Zone into their War Zone.

What is more disturbing than any single headline is the way instability travels — how a political sickness elsewhere can drift across borders like weather. It can feel as though the U.S. sneezed, and Trinidad and Tobago caught the virus: the coarsening of civic life, the splitting of communities into camps, the steady normalization of contempt.

And yes — racism is part of that machinery. Not always loud. Often strategic. It works by poisoning trust, making neighbors suspicious, turning difference into danger, and identity into a weapon. It is the old tool of exploitation: divide the people, weaken the nation, and sell the fracture as “inevitable.”

But Trinidad and Tobago has an answer that predates this moment — our own testimony, our national anthem, which reads like a civic covenant:

Forged from the love of liberty,
in the fires of hope and prayer,
with boundless faith in our destiny,
we solemnly declare…

Side by side we stand,
islands of the blue Caribbean Sea…

HERE EVERY CREED AND RACE FIND AN EQUAL PLACE.

That is not decoration. That is doctrine. That is who we are.

From Caripachaima to Laventille, our families are not isolated stories — we are braided histories. Many of us carry the evidence in our bloodlines: African, Indian, Chinese, European, Syrian-Lebanese, Indigenous roots, and every combination in between. Names like Fong, Indrani, Smith, Alvarez — none of them cancels the other. Together, they are the palette of the nation.

So when we see an onslaught that feels more pervasive and divisive — when the national atmosphere shifts toward suspicion, scapegoating, and imported talking points — we should not pretend it is “just politics.” It is governance by fracture. It is social engineering by grievance. And it is how nations get softened: not only by external pressure, but by internal unraveling.

If foreign military activity, strategic assets, or “security arrangements” are increasing in visibility or consequence, then the public deserves clarity — not vibes, not slogans, not press statements that treat citizens like children. We deserve specifics: what is being permitted, under what authority, with what limits, with what parliamentary oversight, and with what protections for sovereignty and regional diplomacy. Anything less invites fear — and fear invites division.

And we must be careful with our language too: the moment we call any people “shithole,” we become what we claim to resist. But we can name what is real: contempt for small states is a known posture in great-power politics. Small nations are often treated as staging grounds, bargaining chips, or “zones of convenience.” That is not paranoia — that is history.

We do not need denial. We do not need mud-slinging. We do not need to blame-and-shame our way into collapse.

We need principles.

We need unity without uniformity.

We need a Trinidad and Tobago that refuses to outsource its conscience.

This is where Minshall is genius— not as a MAS architect, but as a national seer. The grotesque figures, the mechanized bodies, the dehumanized “man-rat” (Rat Race 1986) visions — they were never just for spectacle. They were warnings about what happens when people become programmable, when culture becomes a mask for control, when our humanity is traded for survival politics.

And that is the crossroads we are approaching: a nation can either stand for something, or fall for any charade dressed up as power.

So I am saying this plainly — not as an “expert,” but as a citizen paying attention:

Trinidad and Tobago comes first.
Our sovereignty is not negotiable.
Our diversity is not a weakness.
Our anthem is not performance. It is promise.

Here every creed and race find an equal place.
And may God bless our nation.