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
