Hartley Neita, ContributorIN PREVIOUS years I have made many New Year resolutions. Some I kept while most were forgotten within the first week.
For example, I was a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker for over half of my life and my first resolution each year was to give up the habit. Those annual resolutions lasted less than one day.
Until ten years ago, I said to myself one night that I wished I could stop the puffing. And did.
So last week, I decided to abandon the ritual of resolutions and listed a number of wishes and hopes.
KEEP MY COOL
The first was to wish that you will all help me to keep my cool this year. One was that TVJ would stop beginning their nightly news programmes without a litany of murders.
I do not expect that murders should go un-reported but please do not colour the screen with the blood of the victims. In addition, please do not show the agony of relatives bawling their hearts out.
Both of the major television stations also interview policemen and persons claiming to be witnesses to accidents giving interpretations of these incidents and making accusations about who is to be blamed. That, is not good news reporting. It is interpretative.
Another wish I have made is that I hope that I will not be distracted this year by members of the audience who have seen the movie or play before and who loudly tell their dates about the plot, saying things like 'watch the star bwoy now, him goin' box down the man'.
Despite pleas at functions, there are still many who allow their cell telephones to ring during luncheons, lectures, and even weddings and funerals. This year, I hope this will cease.
NO POLITICIANS
Another hope is that young athletic men will not use elevators to carry them one floor up or down. In addition, there is the habit of entering elevators and even though the floor of destination is lit, some persons punch the button, angrily, not only once but sometimes twice. Please spare me this year.
I also wish that I will not hear men in clubs, and of men in public passenger vehicles, boasting of their sexual conquests. Ninety per cent of what they claim is fiction, but what is even worse is when they name the women involved. How crass!
This year, I would like to not to have to read articles, and hear discussions on radio which are without any base about politics and politicians. These journalists do not understand the political processes which guide parties and they give us personal assumptions which have no basis in fact.
I am also hoping that I will not hear one of our political pundits prophesying as he has been doing for the past 15 years that "the economy is on the edge of a precipice". Had he been right, we would have been wallowing in misery long ago.
I hope, too, that drivers behind me will not blow their horns when we stop at traffic lights. There are also the owners of motor vehicles who have installed boom boxes in their cars and play dancehall music at a sound level which can be heard chains away.
ON THE ROAD
This year, I do not want to be stopped by policemen who, while asking for my papers, immediately tell me how long they have been standing in the sun, having had a meal six hours before and not a drop to drink.
I was told this week of a lady executive who was driving her mother's car, and who was told that because the name on her driver's licence was different from the name of the owner of the vehicle she was in danger of being charged for driving a stolen vehicle. The papers don't match, he said.
She handed him a US$20 note. "Now this is the right paper," he said and waved her on her way.
