One of the most serious aspects of life today is the widening gap between talk and action.
It happens in this region, it happens everywhere. The United Nations symbolizes the phenomenon. It has become almost irrelevant because vast numbers of talkers gather there and make great declarations and pass wordy resolutions while real people in the real world act as if the talkers in that great booming talk-shop did not exist.
I want to call attention to a specific example of action ignoring rhetoric which has particularly serious implications for us in the Caribbean. First I will give the world-wide context and then narrow it down to the Caribbean.