Open Letter to President G.M.R.

Dear Mr. President,



You are a very articulate man. I wish to be so here. I submit that it is not true in all cases that "to err is not to act disreputably".



To err is to make a mistake. It is a mistake for students to disrespect each other and their teachers, or to waste time fighting rather than learning; for a cook to use salt where he should use sugar; for a surgeon to remember a joke or nightmare suddenly and, hand jerking, to cut the carotid artery of his patient; for a nurse to administer the wrong medicine having taken up the wrong bottle; for a teenage girl to willfully engage in activity that makes her pregnant when she has no means whatsoever of supporting herself, except the means that prostitutes may have.



It is surely a mistake for a person to drive drunk only because they forgot to call a designated driver, and because they also forgot that they had not called such a driver. Forgetting is a very human trait, but in the eyes of the law, this act, which stemmed from a very human error, is a disreputable act, the act of a criminal. All these acts are the results of normal mistakes in thinking, judgment, and remembering. But they are not 'reputable' either; they are irresponsible: they cost a great deal. Not only in life-and-death terms but in life-and-life terms- the difference between just existing, as many animals do, and living, as befits the dignity true humanity deserves.



You see, unpunished errors are destructive to the fabric of society and civilization directly (as in murder) or indirectly (as in plagiarism). They prevent honorable citizens from living with the dignity of knowing they are protected by a reliable social code of ethics, to which all citizens, regardless of position, must adhere, and they encourage those less honorable to risk profiting from dishonourable behaviour. Thus, errors are very expensive; like anything creating debt, they should be paid for or strenuously discouraged—by a privation of some kind, like an interest rate, whether self-imposed or society imposed—to discourage their being repeated.



I agree that a mistake-maker's/wrongdoer's intentions must be considered when deciding what should be done about their errors. I acknowledge that Trinidad and Tobago's society regularly and carelessly uses the pressure of rumour and mauvais langue to blackmail public figures and others into submission to its apparent desires. But the kind of thinking that states that it is an axiom of human behaviour that "to err is not to act disreputably", in my view, is what encourages so many errors to be made daily, errors against which every effort should have been made to ensure their non-occurrence. The laxness and leniency towards errors is devastatingly destroying our people and nation.


I hope you see why for me, you have not cleared the air. I don't think you should resign for the reasons the media seems to list. I think you should resign because you seem to believe something that no civilized bank or country could and successfully run its affairs: that the only account required for errors of the kind you made is encapsulated in the tired cliché: "To err is human, to forgive is divine."