So what is “news”? Long-time students of journalism and communication would all explain and define: “news is new information made known”. (It’s not news if it’s not known to people even though it might exist!) Sufficiently explained, I’ll concede. But often news is used to include recent or current events, reports, factual, actual immediate or fast happening, even personal ideas and opinions.
For my most brief offering today I emphasise the traditional academic meaning of news. Even as the specific category of news and its frequency tend to depress me into a stage of allowing negativity to overwhelm. All this in a land named Guyana that is hustling to emerge from prolonged periods of political and developmental blight. As economic promise beckons for a home-based population not even one million strong.
So what exactly am I going on/preaching about? Well I still – as a non-conformist traditional senior – buy, hold, leaf through and read actual newspapers. In my hands, on my desk. These newspapers reflect a society whose under-fifty citizens – not the majority but too many – seem extremely intolerant, mindless about the sanctity of human life and given to mining, wounding, violence and murder.
The pages are rife with daily assaults of stabbings, other wounding, strangulations, all forms of violence and murder! Court trials of past heinous acts and current monstrous acts.
Vehicular homicide is not so described here in law as yet. But arrant carelessness behind vehicle’s wheels and drunkenness are now causing multiple deaths on roadways every week. Just what has happened to reasoning, restraint and compromise amongst our people? In my youth occasional murder traumatised our grand-parents. How would they exist these days?
Frankly speaking to me the decline in two-parent (married) parenting; lack of genuine credible role-models for the youth; even the watered-down, artificial status of the religious institutions and their counsellors; all result in soul-less, vocal, ignorant minorities in our communities.
Little and adult-in-years – monsters commit life-taking crimes, as selfish phony leaders, political pretenders and publicity-seeking, self-appointed fake moralistic arbiters in the media, blame economics and politics only. Whilst a police force in flux is expected to prevent deadly violations. Poor us.
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Negativity, depression must never triumph!
The world watches, with “good” intentions daily as a huge society named Ukraine is being pummelled and bombed out of civilised existence. It’s therefore understandable that remaining Ukrainians should abandon that human virtue, value, expectation called hope.
All the odds currently seem against the existence of their once-thriving joyful society. Yet many still fight the invader Russians. Hope still springs eternal? It should.
Guyanese, now accustomed to delayed, postponed or cancelled meaningful comprehensive national development, are daring to hope again. Despite the politics of protest and racism – real or perceived – which seem dedicated to negativity.
We look to oil and gas status and revenues attracting more loans, grants and goodwill towards transformative national and community development which impacts homes in an expected trickle-down. We hope for political leaders and social and economic managers to fashion our prosperous future. I suggest the following as sustained homework: even if occasionally, listen to what political and community leaders say – or incite; identify just who use propaganda and social media to do what; ask for solid evidence to justify criticisms or “assaults” made against certain national leaders. Agreed?
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Political miscellany – local, international…
These few sentences right here are not so much about politics as they reflect mindsets, attitudes and (collective) will – or lack thereof.
After years I had a brief but heartfelt chat with Afro-Guyanese professional and specialised expert Charles Ceres. Mr. Ceres is a geological engineer, among other abilities, who sent some of his staff to Houston, Texas years ago when our nascent oil sector was just being made manifest. The first Afro-Guyanese to seize such opportunity
The purpose of my chat was to get Ceres’ opinion as to why more Afro-Guyanese enterprises or potential oil-related businesses are not – or could not be – competing for lucrative positions in our oil-and-gas industry. It won’t be ethical for me to transmit most of Mr. Ceres’ opinions on the issue. Some answers/ opinions were obvious.
But he did lament his own conclusion that too many Guyanese minds’ were fashioned, since slavery, to expect others to provide for their own interests, hinting that a certain mentality resided in those who feared innovation and commercial, scientific pursuits. So much more to “explore” here. Right?
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1) Does Opposition Leader Comrade Norton and his senior specialist- colleagues have a “practical” mission to engage relevant skills to develop the oil and gas sector?
2) Shouldn’t the politics of position and division give way to bi-partisan guidance for national industries to benefit all constituencies? Is that really beyond our “national leaders”?
3) A Charles Ceres-inspired solar farm project to power East Coast Demerara industry couldn’t get past prominent Granger-coalition types. (It’s not only politics that thwart certain specific economic development.) Why?
4) In Somalia – the land of Britain’s Mo Farah – children are starving and dying right now. As the world watches. Like it watches Ukraine “dissolve” as a nation. Lack of political will?
5) Just who are the political leaders from the PPP, PNC, ANUG, or the 6 to 10 other “parties”, fit to follow?
6) LFS Burnham was given to wearing GPF, GDF and GNS uniforms. (He spared the WRSM!) Why did President Ali dress like an Arab last Saturday? Because he felt “Islamic”? Ho-Ho-Ho.
`Til next week
