President Anthony Carmona yesterday hailed the country’s youngest-ever recipient of a national award, four-year-old Kal-El Joel Maxwell Alleyne as a leader in the making.
Carmona was speaking at Independence Day celebrations 2015, at the Fire Services headquarters, Wrightson Road, in Port-of-Spain.
Alleyne, who is also called “Superman” was awarded the Humming Bird Medal (Bronze) for gallantry at last night’s Independence Awards at Queen’s Hall, St Ann’s.
Alleyne of Santa Cruz was labelled a hero after climbed up a 300-foot precipice to get help for his mother and aunt who ran off North Coast Road to Maracas on August 18. Carmona was high in praise for fire officers for “bigging up” Alleyne.
“What you all have done, you all have made a leader in him.”
“This is what, as adults we need to do. We need leaders of our young men and our young women in the communities, the villages, the towns.”
Earlier in his 17-minute speech, Carmona said there were too many “dustbin” critics in T&T.
“So, the fact that a dustbin makes a lot of noise doesn’t give a dustbin depth, it may give it size but it does not necessarily give it profoundity,” Carmona said before toasting to the nation 53rd anniversary celebrations.
“We have a lot of dustbins throughout our society banging the roads,” he said.
“There is nothing wrong with saying that something is wrong (in the country) but there is something wrong with saying that if you are doing something right, it is wrong.”
He added: “We live in a society where, sometimes, entrenched wrongs have become entrenched rights. And no matter how you push to change that, there is a perception that you are encroaching on freedom (of expression).”
Carmona insisted: “That is the reality of our society.”
He said in the same way the shootouts at Walmart in America don’t define that country, “the hiccups we endure and we have to bear, they do not define us.”
He said, “we are engaged too much in negativity and not positivity as a nation” and as the country begins its 54th year of independence, “we have to change that paradigm. We have to learn to appreciate each other (and) engage in compassion, kindness, decency man, simple basic decency.”
Carmona said that was necessary “because at the end of the day, we all going to go down in a place 6 x 6 x 3.”
He also spoke about the young people in crime hot-spots who were dying because of engaging criminal activity.
He said he would say to them, “you want to be put in a board coffin where Jah Cure music and Vybz Kartel music are played and your partners (are) drinking beers on your head, while your mother is crying and those are your friends.”
Among those in attendance at the celebrations were Chief Justice Ivor Archie and Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley—who requested the Fire Services band to perform Frank Sinatra’s My Way—National Security Minister Brigadier Carl Alfonso, acting Chief Fire Officer Kenny Gopaul, and Port-of-Spain Mayor Raymond Tim Kee.