You can identify change in the world by reading lengthy polemics, or by examining complex data, or by attending scientific forums. You can also do it, informally, most of the time, by simply looking at what’s going on around you. Long before the data comes in to tell us about a change in the world, we can come to grips with the shifts, or the differences, by simply being in an observational mood.
Sometimes, the awareness comes from a moment. Last week, I’m watching a women’s soccer match between the national teams of Germany and France. It’s fairly long-range action so the players are indistinct, but in the close-ups of the team members I notice a striking thing: there are black athletes in both the German and the French teams. In that brief moment, from a totally unexpected source, you see right before you incontrovertible evidence of the astonishing change in racial distribution, and indeed acceptance, that we now have on the planet. Just a few decades ago, those two teams would have been lily-white. Now almost every team, male or female, has one or two, or more, black players. You don’t have to spend time looking up any data, or consult any scientific treatise to see the change; just go to an international soccer match or a track-and-field event; it’s out there on the field. You can take a picture of it and email it to your friends; sudden but unerring evidence of significant social change.
Consider the Guyana economy: If you visited Guyana in the 1970s and 1980s, you didn’t have to spend any time doing any research to know that it was going through a very lean period. You only had to cast your eyes on the long, empty shelves in the supermarkets (I took a photograph of one to show to my GT friends in Toronto), or the long lines at gas stations, sometimes winding around the block, to get a ration of kerosene oil. Those lines of residents, holding umbrellas to counter the hot sun, were an instant message shouting “shortages of essential items” loud and clear. On my second trip to Guyana with Tradewinds, the taxi that the promoter sent to pick us up at the airport had holes in the floor; you could look down and see the road below flashing by, and I saw one taxi in town with no doors on the left side. The Pegasus hotel was rationing toilet paper; they would replace it in the rooms only half-a-roll at a time. Today one can see the economic rebound in the full supermarket shelves (buying 36 rolls of toilet paper is now an everyday transaction), in the modern cars on the road, and in the array of high-rise buildings across the city. We can argue about the inequality of some of this progress, but we don’t have to do any research to know that it has come.
Growing up in the Guyana of 40 or so years ago, we were aware of only two opiates – alcohol and tobacco. Today, without asking for any statistics from the various pertinent ministries, we know that there has been an explosion in the use of a variety of mood expansion drugs, many of which we have only come to know in recent years. Almost every week there is a report of yet another interception, here or overseas, of airline travellers transporting cocaine and other exotic chemicals, and every few months there is news of another mood-altering substance that has come on the international market and is already in the hands, or bodies, of local consumers. In my youth, the only odours at the local public dance fete was the smoke from the chicken barbecue; these days, the smell of marijuana is common in the party, and at some of the more adventurous functions it can even reach citizens passing by on the street. One doesn’t have to ask the ministry for data to confirm the increased drug use; our nose tells the story pungently.
Similarly, we know without asking that the manufacturers of cell phones, and the providers of telephone utility service, are reaping a bonanza in Guyana. Again, without access to sales figures, one can see the explosion just walking the street. Virtually every person has a cell phone, and the behaviours consequent to that (texting, phoning, photography) have taken over the population like a tsunami. It is a common sight now to see persons at public functions totally engaged with their cell phones while a speech is being delivered, or at a theatre performance, or even during the course of a funeral. The observation clues us into the vagaries of social behaviour now but at the same time, in parallel, it tells us that there has been a staggering number of cell phones and accompanying devices being sold here daily. To get the specific numbers we would have to do some research in a dusty records room somewhere, but the significant shift in our social behaviours, caused by the devices, is staring us in the face. From the observation, we are also made aware of the speed with which this transformation has come to us. It is there at every turn, in private moment or public display; it has been transformational, not only here but globally. The ‘why’ of it will require intensive study and research but, whether we own one of the devices or not, the ‘what’ of it we already know from seeing.
The intriguing thing is that in many cases, the so-called man in the street is gaining his knowledge of his world that way. To talk to him/her is to realize that he/she is often not paying much attention to the scientific analyses or opinion pieces that are presented to societies, large or small, by various means, but is acquiring information and reaching positions largely from what is there to be seen in his/her actual surrounding world.
