What Is Joke for School Children, Is Death for Crapaud

In Trinidad and Tobago, we have an old saying: “What is joke for school chile, is death for crapaud.”

It comes from a cruel little game children once played pelting a frog with sticks and stones, laughing as though it were fun, never grasping the torment they were inflicting. The frog felt everything. The children felt nothing.

That is exactly where America now finds itself.

What looks like a grand spectacle a gleeful performance of power, distraction, and swagger is, for the people living under it, a slow and merciless beating. A daily pummeling that strips dignity, agency, health, livelihood, and truth.

The children are playing. The crapaud is dying.

What We Are Not Seeing Or Refusing to See

This administration behaves as if politics is a carnival game:

Blow up boats in Caribbean waters with little explanation. Shrug at the death toll, which news agencies now place at more than sixty lives across a series of strikes on alleged drug boats from Venezuela and the wider region. Flex warships near Venezuela’s territorial line. Quietly move senior civilian officials Miller, Hegseth, Noem and others into fortified U.S. military compounds as if it were all a summer camp upgrade.