Geof BrownLAST WEEK'S column was written in New Jersey, US and this one was begun there. With 29 inches of snow (depth) on the ground outside and an ice-covered walkway on which I slithered dangerously to the car, it dawned on me again how much we take for granted here. "We" means almost all of us. "Here" means Jamaica. Back in Jamaica on Thursday the temperature on landing in Montego Bay was 78 degrees Fahrenheit. When we left Newark airport in New Jersey that morning the temperature was 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
The difference of 60 degrees (15 degrees below freezing point) in temperature in New Jersey and being able to walk on solid ground here not on solid ice brought home the reality which had been teasing my mind over there. We take too much for granted. Sure, we have our share of natural disasters floods, hurricanes, earthquakes. But none of these is relentlessly with us year after year without fail, changing only in degree, never in kind. No wonder Shakespeare compared the pain of ingratitude ("as the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune") with the "unkind winter wind".
I recall when living in Canada having to use an ice-pick to free the handle and lock of the car door in winter, then having to use some de-icing fluid to spray the lock so that the key could be inserted. I recall that my wife's car was buried for two months in our backyard, because the snow which covered it froze into an icy tomb. It took the coming of spring to melt the tomb.
The snowstorm in New Jersey last week had me vividly recalling those memories and a host of others like them. And I needed the reminder. For like most of us I have been taking our life-giving weather for granted, even as the yearly winters of our northern neighbours threaten their very survival.
But here's the main point. When we make comparisons between our situations and theirs, we too often forget the contexts and the realities.
Their advanced technology, for instance, is in large part a response to their survival needs in a harsh unforgiving environment. You cannot wait for winter to come before preparing fuel for heat to last you through the freezing months.
We here need make no such preparations and thereby we are inevitably a less disciplined people. Communications technology is in large part a response to the need of winter-bound people to communicate with one another because their physical mobility was so limited.
In our nature-bountiful environment we have free movement just about 365 days per year with abundant sunshine to boot.
Let me try to sharpen the point. Many of our pundits are forever comparing and contrasting our under-achievement and our manifest deficits and deficiencies with the equally manifest achievements and efficiencies of our wealthy developed northern and European neighbours. That is taking a lot for granted.
In the first place, the nations whose systems and successes we ape as well as admire, have had hundreds even thousands of years to work out their responses to the challenges of their environments. Their developed technology which we borrow and use is the result.
The Third World which they ravaged and savaged to provide fodder for their own wealth and technological advancement was left splintered into a welter of struggling "new" nations. Whereas our global "developed" Northern and European neighbours had centuries to grow slowly and to adjust to their developing technologies, all we can do in the Third World is play catch-up. And we have no forgiving grace period within which to do that.
Now this is not to excuse our inefficiencies, indiscipline and under-achievement. For we do have the capacity to borrow and use the technologies for which our nations were originally largely the source. Singapore demonstrates that. But we must also allow that not all of the young struggling "new" nations will get everything right in very short order and be every bit as successful as the technological pioneers. Singapore is the exception which proves the rule.
The same is true for political systems and procedures of governance. Unless we ignore the English Magna Carta breakthrough of 1215, the US Boston Tea Party breakthrough of 1773, the US Civil War of the 1860s, the various cataclysms of Europe with the resulting two world wars and the Russian break-up in our times. Let our comparisons and contrasts be informed by the facts of history and circumstance.
And a very happy and healthy if not prosperous New Year to you all.
Geof Brown is an HRD consultant who lectures part-time at the University of the West Indies. E-mail: browngeof@hotmail.com
