Maybe as I get older, I have less patience. But there is no maybe about the fact that I don’t have much tolerance for rhetoric. I’ve seen and heard the rhetorical slant so many times in my life, and from I was a boy, as the Jamaicans say, it doesn’t grab me, and now in my later years I don’t care for it at all. The enormous volume of ideas and opinions that land on us in this technological age is beyond comprehension and every day it gets larger. In that volume, therefore, we have to leave rhetoric behind and use our time on practical matters. The example triggering this comment is yet another letter this week in our local press where the word ‘hope’ takes centre stage. We are hoping for a good 2017; hoping for an end to violence against women; hoping for no more racial voting; hoping for an end to crime…almost every ill brings out the word ‘hope’. The problem, in most of those well-meaning exhortations, is that’s where the entreaties end – resting on hope but not leading or suggesting strategies. Time and again, that’s the pattern – fervent complaints about our ills but no blueprint, no suggestions for correction.
Hoping for the problem to be resolved, while a useful attitude, often falls into the bottomless rhetoric vault. All the emotional talk about what we’re against is nothing until we then formulate or lead some form of action. Hope is certainly where we start, but hope is an emotion not a strategy, and once we get to the point of recognizing a problem we had better move fast to the strategy stage or all we’re doing is delivering politically correct rhetoric that is forgotten by tomorrow.
In a recent and classic example, we have the words of outgoing US President Barack Obama in a New Yorker magazine interview with David Remnick. In light of the divisions in America during the recent presidential campaigns, and the racial tensions, he was asked what advice he gave to his children. Obama replied, “What I say to them is that people are complicated. Societies and cultures are really complicated … This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms and it’s messy. And your job as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.” In his comments to his children, notice that Obama skipped right over the “my hope is” stage and, while acknowledging the complications of the task, went straight to actions for the remedial process – “to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding”.
President Obama is talking in concrete terms. He doesn’t congratulate his children for their awareness; he doesn’t even mention it. Instead he offers them direct advice on what to do. He emphasizes it will be difficult and “messy” work, and that it will require people putting their shoulders to the wheel and fighting and demonstrating and showing up to confront the issue, and particularly striking is his point about their fundamental obligations to tackle the matter – it is, he says, “your job as a decent human being.” He’s showing them the approach and notice, in particular, he uses four clear, direct words to hammer home the essential point: that “it is your job”. He assumes the hope is there; he’s charging them with how to proceed in fixing the problem they recognize.
We need to take the Obama lesson to heart. It is powerful stuff coming from a remarkable mind, and the counsel he offered his children is something that should resonate for us in Guyana as we vent our feelings on one issue or another confronting us. Each of us, and I include myself, raising the red flag about an issue should be accompanying the alarm with some concrete ideas to do with remedy, with repair.
Stop leaving me, and others like me, with only hope. I’m so full of hope there is no room left in me for patience. For the vexing problems before us, give me some concrete advice. Tell me, for example, how we go about fixing, or at least ameliorating, this imbedded racial division that is crippling our country. Suggest strategies.
Hoping it will end shows we’re aware, but that alone does not take us forward unless some action follows to tackle the condition. Maybe suggestions have been made; I haven’t seen them. I recall being in a group of private citizens here about a year ago who came together to discuss the problem of householders dumping garbage in public spaces, and after about an hour of fulmination, an intense young man from Buxton, familiar to me in music circles, stood up and virtually shouted, “I’m hearing all this talk about the problem, but no talk about what we do. You don’t have to tell me about the garbage being dumped; I can see it and smell it. I need you to tell me what I can do about it. What group can I join? Whom do I telephone or write to discuss how we get this under control. Otherwise, you’re only wasting your time and mine here. I know the ‘what’; tell me the ‘how’, please.” That was over a year ago. I saw the young man again recently, and asked him if he remembered his outburst. He laughed and said, “I do remember, and you know what? I still haven’t heard the how.”
