WHAT WITH ALL the Olympic talk, a friend asked recently: “Lowdown, how do you keep it up after all these years? Performance-enhancing substances?” I figured my wife must’ve been bragging so I admitted: “Well, yes. goat’s milk, pork and cow-belly tripe”.
Turns out, however, he meant how have I kept writing consistent nonsense for 27 years. No drugs needed there. That’s pure art!
Last Sunday I got interviewed by a pretty Japanese damsel, an Associate Professor at Otsuma Women’s University. OWU was set up to train women in homemaking skills, namely, to be “good wives and wise mothers”.
Maybe UWI needs to look in this direction.
On Brass Tacks recently I heard female Cave Hill graduates, some with three degrees, complaining they can’t get jobs. Other colleagues, they said are omitting any mention of UWI on their CVs to improve their chances of being hired. At a time when Cave Hill is screaming for tax-payers’ money to be spent on an institution whose graduates employers apparently don’t want, there’s a message in there for us all.
Actually there are messages all around but mankind seems trapped in ignorance of his own making and plunges headlong into abyss after abyss.
Take the US presidential election. After months of wrangling and elimination, they’ve ended up with Trump and Hillary! Can you believe it? Out of 320 million people, Trump and Hillary?
Trevor Kavanagh has been writing about international politics for over 40 years. He says: “The American presidential election has become the longest slow motion political car crash in history, a Washington horror movie with a dangerous ending, whoever wins the White House”.
Okay, stick a pin right there. Trev is telling us up front that both candidates are pig doots. Yet he is aghast that Trump seems to have suggested that someone shoot Hillary. He “hopes to God she wins on Tuesday, November 8”. In other words, he is willing to settle for the lesser evil and impose four years of “horror” on America and the world!
The logical course, in my opinion, would be to shoot them both. But we need not be that radical. Why not just ignore them and elect someone with a modicum of ability to lead the country?
In similar manner, we feel ourselves trapped in a Trump/Hillary scenario of our own making. There is no legal requirement that either of the encumbers or their parties must be chosen. So if, as many are saying, there is discomfort with the choices we now have, why not look elsewhere? Not voting, as many seem resolved to do, won’t solve anything.
It is, of course, the curse of political parties, to B is not to D and vice versa. And the disease has now spread through the rank and file. Political football, big time. The party in power may try to implement projects to improve the economic and social well-being of the country. Or they may just be facilitating big-up business friends.
But oppositions see their role as to oppose. And one suspects that sometimes opposition party members in key government positions may not be averse to doing some opposing themselves. After all, if you can block a project until your party is back in power, won’t its success be credited to your side forevermore? And partisan political scientists, economists and talk show hosts may also be in the do.
A pox on all political football, say I. Why not instead let’s set our country on a marathon course to success? Note the difference. In a marathon the competitors also want to win. But they do this by moving towards a common goal, all in the same direction. Ponder on these things.
Meanwhile let me respectfully disagree with Sir David Simmons on two points: first, his claim that beating and hanging criminals won’t deter crime. Let him check Singapore where crime is amazingly low. Caning and execution (even for drug possession) work wonders.
Secondly, he links crime to poverty, poor education, unemployment and such like. Then in the next breath, he admits that corruption is rife and becoming rifer. One doesn’t associate “corruption” with the poor and unemployed. That is the province of politicians, government officials, millionaires and big businessmen. Still crime, however.
Crime, big and small, flourishes where there is no effective punishment to deter it. Simple so.
Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator. Email:porkhoad@gmail.com