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DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

LETTER TO the editor are not always about complaints or disappointments as many often recognise laudable efforts. But reading two newspapers on August 6 it struck me how almost all of the letters on that day dealt not only with behaviours that seem to defy rationality and good sense, without any moral or ethical consideration, but critically how by insinuation they seem to reflect an almost total indifference by the alleged guilty parties to being accountable for what they say or do.
It is difficult to understand, for example, how from one letter a response to the AG vote by some as being a matter of self-interest could be berated with such ire as if the law is inviolate and its practitioners sacrosanct. And when there is so much in this profession to dispute such an assumption.
Or in another instance where the line minister, demonstrating little diplomatic sensitivity, could take a seemingly pro-China stance as regards the Nancy Pelosi visit to Taiwan supporting that country’s One-China policy. I might add, with the Government’s equally anti-US position in its accommodation of Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez entering from a country then on a US embargo, when the US is our back-door neighbour on whom we are expected to rely in times of difficulty, as has been the case with vaccines for covid19.
Or in yet another, a perceived outrageous budget of $7.5 million for independence celebrations when some of such funds could have been diverted to people suffering from poor infrastructure, especially roads, and now floods.
And further, how cable/copper/scrap iron theft can almost be treasonous in the way it causes so much inconvenience and danger to the public, with phones down and falling into a manhole at night a horrendous reality, adding insult to injury with the brazen image of one copper thief on a local TV station standing on the hood of a truck, sawing off a cable with such enthusiasm and energy, as if to say to the authorities, “look and scream if you will,” arrogantly displaying a symptom of the disease of “crime without consequence” now plaguing the people.
And in another letter, the bypassing of a senior employee for reasons, seemingly less than just and fair, reminiscent of the “dark old days.” And again on the subject of fairness and justice, abandoning the many in this country and abroad still in possession of the old $100 bills, many for one reason or another not meeting the deadline, unable to redeem them, provoking an impassioned plea from the letter writer for rectification.
Or another writer’s lament over the lack of good sense or indifference in restoring the now malfunctioning Humanities clock at UWI, our flagship institution of learning denied a visible time presence.
Or for yet another, the ironic contradiction in WASA’s management’s concerns about a “leak” of information re retrenchment while there are “leaks” galore in the water system to the detriment of consumers.
And finally, even as there is a worthwhile call in one letter for our identification with millions still enslaved in Africa and India, yet there is a call for the removal of historical names which in essence would erase a history of which we should be aware lest we forget.
Or a call for reparations, justifiable as that may seem, but problematic in its implementation, for the call for such, according to the letter, is from people in the present who knew nothing about slavery.
And as an addendum, the history of the world has been a history of domination and enslavement, Indians by the British in India and equally so with Africans in Africa, Jews by the Nazis, Attila with his hordes sweeping the plains of Mongolia, the Christian Crusaders against the Muslim Sulieman of Arabia, the Spanish and British and French against the native Indians in the New World, and the American pioneers in North America against the native Americans, ad infinitum.
These letters of August 6 had the effect of rousing me from my slumber, for as a collective, coincidental as it may seem, they tell a story of the myriad elements of irrationality and indifference in which we are enmeshed on a daily basis as our anguished and plaintive cries go unheeded and unanswered.
No society is perfect but there has to be a moral and ethical sense of a balance between right and wrong at every level of our existence, especially among those who lead, if we are to remain civilised and not degenerate into total chaos.
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