My reason for writing this letter is a corporate entity's declaration of almost a half-billion dollar profit for the last quarter of 2013 when I, as a valued customer–so I am often told–collects less than one per cent on my savings and even less on my mutual funds, funds I had hoped for to see me through my retirement, while the lending rate for the average domestic customer is nearer ten per cent.
Far from me to query this holy of holies in economic theory which is the maximisation of profits at all cost, but what is significant about profit margins such as these is that they are celebrated as productivity at its best even though what lies beneath is a gross form of inequity which we take for granted, with the small guy on the receiving end.
And this is my inspiration for this letter: our taking for granted what is touted as laudable or acceptable without critically examining what lies beneath. For example, we revel in being an "oil and gas economy" and justly so, but do we focus on its fallout as in La Brea, or Moruga, or reportedly, as in the Guaracara?
Carnival is often dubbed the "greatest show on earth" with its creativity and revelry, an apt description no doubt, but do we ever spare a thought about its underlying licence and the discomfort and pain it brings to others, or the way we accept without question "icons" who have been found guilty of criminal behaviour?
What of the fanfare in government housing, laudable in serving a basic need, but what of the dissembling to get a unit or its encroachment on prime agricultural land, or more importantly, that is it slowly eroding that will to work and save towards your own, as obtained in the past?Do we revel in seemingly favourable statistics, in ad hoc committees which are formed in reaction to criminal behaviour, in the empty rhetoric to solve crime, while we evade the reality of the gore which flows on a daily basis?
Do we continue to flaunt our ever-expanding tertiary education system claiming First World status, and ignore the long-term inevitable mediocrity arising from the lack of scrutiny and supervision which lie beneath?Do we succumb to the call to "come home" in the politics, directly or indirectly, on both sides of the divide, and are unable to sense the inevitable ethnic division implicit in such a call, and do we for the same reason patronise our leaders and refuse to call them to account despite their obvious shortcomings?
If only I had space to go on, but it is evident that as a people we tend to take people and issues at face value without critically examining what lies beneath, and it must be a long term objective of our education system to sow the seeds of a critical interrogation of the world in which we live to minimise our often one-dimensional view of it, enabling us to make more informed choices in the process.
Dr Errol Benjamin
via e-mail