Music To Our Ears..."El Sistema" For Trinidad and Tobago

Social Development looks at music to fight crime.
Trinidad & Tobago's Newsday | Wednesday, December 29 2010

Minister of the People and Social Development Glenn Ramadharsingh yesterday sat with renowned musician and artist Dr Pat Bishop and three musicians from Venezuela to have preliminary discussions on a new and innovative crime-fighting initiative centred around music, art and sports.

The programme will be based on El Sistema, a publicly financed voluntary sector music education programme in Venezuela and will be tailored to provide youths with an alternative to crime.

Eleazar José Yegüez, regional coordinator of El Sistema in Sucre State; Jesus Beltran Acosta, director of Cariaco’s Orquestra; musician Llelina Poryillo and interpreter Mildred Yegüez- Francois were on hand to provide the ministry with ideas and direction.

Ramadharsingh said he saw a model of this programme in Colombia where there were high levels of poverty but music was used to combat crime and other social ills in those communities. He was particularly impressed that no one was turned away because of lack of finances or on the grounds of proficiency. Read more...

El Sistema
July 20, 2008 2:55 PM

Through a system of early training and local orchestras, Venezuela has developed an orchestra that is world famous. Bob Simon reports. (This segment was originally broadcast on April 13, 2008.)

Read more: El Sistema: Changing Lives Through Music
..............................................................................................................................




A Note From The Gull

El Sistema - an excellent idea originating in Venezuela, our closest neighbour in the region. Congratulations to the Minister of the People and Social Development, Glenn Ramadharsingh, for recognising the worth of this programme and for actively working to secure for Trinidad and Tobago its many documented benefits for our young people at risk.

Excerpt from video above:

"In the midst of that poverty The System uses classical music to instill self- esteem and confidence. Popular music, Rafael says, wouldn't work. "What they have at home on the radio is popular music all the time. Their father who drinks everyday, gets drunk with that music. So you have to give them something different and when they sit in one of these chairs in the orchestra, they think they are in another country, in another planet and they start changing."

How many times in the past have we heard brother Morgan Job's voice crying in the wilderness, saying the same thing about music and making his plea for the uplifting of the souls and spirits of our children? Like with anything else there is the good and the not so good in what we produce. Some of our popular music is brilliant but the messages conveyed by the rest deliver more spirit blows than blessings. Think, for example, of the number of songs which have emerged in recent times which deliberately glorify and promote abject drunkenness?

Recommendation: Look also at the Montessori and Waldorf educational systems and take the best of both to adapt to our pre and primary school environments and the training of our early childhood educators.

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Traitors "R" Us

I worry, not so much about governments in power but about how their actions/decisions are being assessed and addressed by the citizens, that is, assuming that the citizens are even paying attention for more than three seconds. We are quick to blame our leaders for their failures but we forget that they need guidance also. Choosing to remain blissfully ignorant is also a form of treachery.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague. " ---Marcus Tullius Cicero [42 B.C.E.]

..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Cultivating Intelligence

Coming out of a frustration with the apparent capacity for spinning top in mud which is demonstrated in many countries, I began to consider that it was a lack of intelligence that was at the root of the stasis. I began to examine ways in which this intelligence could be cultivated.

I was not unaware of the problems to be faced, and that more than in any other sector, the exercise of policy making for national information management presented at once the greatest complexity and irony. Policy makers, operating in a state of imperfect knowledge would have to attempt to plot the course to that which was unknown - almost perfect knowledge - and the ability or intelligence to translate this into sustainable evolution.

All policies are value-oriented (De Greene 1993:9) and follow the values (and limitations) of those responsible for their conceptualization and implementation. And as they are often made in the face of ignorance about the real dynamics of the system, how can policy makers overcome this paradox of attempting to formulate the policy when the requisite knowledge for its formulation lies in the distant future and is actually the goal of the policy?

To summarize, "How can the chicken begin to redesign the egg which will improve the chicken?"

DE GREENE, Kenyon B. (Ed.) (1993). A systems-based approach to policymaking. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

A Ministry Of Intelligence?

It is towards sustainable evolution that the word 'intelligence' should find its proper use. Now most commonly applied to the areas of market and national security, this concept can also be used to describe at the national level that which was previously confined to the level of the individual. It is the higher level ability to use information to make judgments, evaluations and inferences and to use this knowledge for beneficial action and coherent adaptation to the environment. (Dedijer & Jequier 1987:14)

Additionally, implicit in the notion of planning for increased intelligence on the national scale is the need for a democratic approach to governance and a political morality which many Third World elites and intellectuals and their counterparts in the developed world might find uncomfortable.

That there is a link between information processes and survival is axiomatic. Those of us who believe that life is something more than mere survival, focus on the link between information processes and improvement of the quality of life (although the life threatening problems which assail modern societies would make 'quality of survival' a more realistic interpretation). The main stumbling block facing information policy makers, if they appreciate the gravity of the issues involved - is how to encapsulate within the limiting pages of a policy document, guidelines which must in essence describe how best to harness the seemingly volatile, pervasive, boundary defying, all encompassing nature of information.

It helps, if one is anxious to avoid oversimplification and reductionism, that information has many faces. A policy which focuses on only one facet will ultimately be just that- a policy on one aspect of information. Information as thing can be recorded or not. It can be said to be non-existent, i.e. when it has not yet been recorded, lost, or recorded but inaccessible. Information exists also as recorded thing or artifact. This is the information typically stored in libraries, databases, in memory, in language, in art, culture, oral history.

Information can be a process. This takes place in every single activity-natural or artificial. This is the process of communication by which living and artificial systems interact with their environments and/or other systems through information processing, e.g. formal education, reading, media It is also important to mention that the search for previously unrecorded information - which could be either deliberate, e.g. research or accidental, e.g. during research and serendipitous experiences - is also an informational process.

There is also information as knowledge. This can be viewed as the end result of the process of informing. The quality of this depends on a variety of factors including the quality of the recorded information and the quality of the process of communication which is also influenced by the qualities of the receiver. This illustrates why the merging of communication theory (which focuses on the construction of meaning and the nature of human message-related behavior) and information science was not surprising(Ruben 1992:17). This justifies the inclusion of information and communication issues in information policy formulation. They are inseparable.

The 'quality of survival' depends however on a final stage. This is the higher level ability to use information to make judgments, evaluations and inferences and to use this knowledge for beneficial action and coherent adaptation to the environment. (Dedijer & Jequier 1987:14)

It is with the information and communications policy which has as its goal the sustaining and improvement of this intelligence which is of concern to me. This does not mean a de-emphasizing of the importance of intelligences relating to specific issues, e.g. economic & financial intelligence, scientific & technological intelligence, market intelligence, political intelligence, security intelligence, development intelligence, environmental intelligence and diplomatic intelligence.

Just as there are multiple intelligences (Armstrong 1994) evident in the human being, there are multiple areas where intelligence activity is required at the national and international levels. However, it has been the trend in the past to give too much weight and at the expense of others, to certain areas which were deemed to be more critical at one time or another to some popular or political thrust. Those which seemed to be of immediate relevance to human development were put on the back burners.

The truth is that all are of equal importance because taken together the maintenance of excellence at all levels will serve to provide the environment which is conducive to sustainable development. Furthermore, this social intelligence which must be developed, cannot be limited by simply national concerns and goals. The nation is not a closed system. This is why thus far, the term national intelligence has been avoided deliberately. The attainment of social intelligence requires that all individuals be provided with the tools and the propensity to interact intelligently with the environment. The permeability of systems borders - whether natural or artificial - renders myopia anachronistic.

ARMSTRONG, Thomas (1994. Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, .
DEDIJER, Stevan & JEQUIER, Nicolas (Eds.) (1987). Intelligence for economic development: An inquiry into the role of the knowledge industry. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
RUBEN, Brent D. (January 1992). The communication-information relationship in system-theoretic perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 43 (1), 15-27.

..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Ministry of The People and Social Development

New ministry to address complaints.
By Ria Taitt Political Editor
Trinidad & Tobago Express | Thursday, June 3rd 2010

"Yesterday, Dr Lincoln Douglas, Minister of State in the Ministry of the People and Social Development, was sworn in at a private ceremony at Knowlsey House, Port of Spain. Speaking after the swearing-in, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who this ministry was the brainchild of, said she envisioned the ministry as one that would have interaction and participation from the people, ’instead of them just coming up against the (government) bureaucracy’." Read more...

I am very interested to see more details about how this new Ministry will function. From what I am reading here it seems like citizens coming up upon brick walls will have recourse to an agency which can assist with specific problems. This is an excellent idea and it should be taken further and probably this aspect has already been considered but not yet formulated - the problems experienced by citizens can be caused by inefficient departments but sometimes these problems are really symptoms of problematic policies that need to be reworked or discarded. This Ministry should also actively engage citizens and solicit their input at the level of policy making.

Some years back, I looked at Singapore's Public Service and their approach to serving citizens and how they understood and actively pursued the satisfaction of the need for continuous improvement. I remember being particularly interested in the Government Feedback Mechanism (REACH).

This is how it is described on the webpage, Public Service for the 21st century (PS21).":

"Engaging citizens

"In the 21st Century, it is not enough to describe a policy to the population when we implement it. It is not even enough just to explain it. We need to consult and connect with our citizens even while the policy is being formulated and designed.

"The Government Feedback mechanism, REACH, has a consultation portal where policy papers and proposals are made available online for public feedback and suggestions. Public officers can also use this medium to explain the rationale for their policies.

"As part of connecting with our citizens, helpful and understanding customers are recognised. For example, the National Library Board (NLB) has a Customer Appreciation Day; PUB, the National Water Agency, has a Friends of Water programme to recognise customers who have contributed towards raising awareness about water; the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) recognises members of the public who give suggestions that lead to significant improvements.

Some of the other initiatives are:

EXCEL - Excellence Through Continuous Learning And Enterprise:

"PS21 seeks to harness the creativity and diversity of the Public Service, reinforce the spirit of continuous improvement, experiment with new ideas, and make training and learning a way of life for our officers."

The Enterprise Challenge (TEC):

"The Enterprise Challenge (TEC) is an initiative to harness innovative ideas for the Public Service. It provides support for the trial testing of innovative ideas that have the potential to create new value and bring about improvements in the delivery of public services. TEC charts a milestone in the Public Service's journey to excellence through innovation and enterprise."

One of the services of the Enterprise Challence initiative falling under "Understanding customers' needs" is the No Wrong Door policy introduced in 2004.

"Since our customers perceive the government as a single entity, it is important that the Public Service works well across agencies. In 2004, the No Wrong Door policy was introduced. It requires all public agencies to put members of the public in contact with the correct agency so they are not turned from one agency to another to have their queries attended to."

The page is well worth a visit but it is just one of the pages in the online version of the "Corporate Book" of the Singapore Public Service. We imitate so much that is inappropriate or harmful. With equal effort we could actively search for and consider initiatives that would definitely improve the quality of life for all citizens.

I believe that the Ministry of Information has been disbanded and that its functions will now fall under the Prime Minister's Office? Perhaps the word "information" could be replaced by "intelligence" and instead of the top down flow as in the delivery of propaganda or fiats the hierarchy could be flattened so that government is in the very centre of mass-line communication, informing the nation about the work of the nation but also informing itself by respectfully seeking and openly using feedback from the nation to improve effectiveness. (This is quite different from eavesdropping on the private lives of citizens or using information to manipulate the population.) I use the word "intelligence" without any qualms because I believe that intelligence is a good thing. It is how the organism actively seeks and processes the information in its environment to maximise its chances for survival.

Whether we use this intelligence for the good of ourselves and the good of the nation while recognising the correlation between the two is another matter. It depends, I believe, on whether or not our families, communities and leaders have consistently made efforts to socialise young minds, by example and instruction, to value and strive only for that which does the least or no harm to ourselves, our brothers and sisters and this beautiful natural environment in which we live
...............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

And The Government Is Supreme

The government is generally left to its own devices in the formulation of policy because of the following conditions as outlined by Dror (1968: 112-114):

- Private individuals play a very small role in policy-making either because of lack of interest or apathy or a perception that it is the business of government. I would like to add that even when citizens are motivated and there is interest in co-governance, there is no easily available channel for immediate and acknowledged citizen input.

- Intellectuals play a similarly small role since they tend to become alienated either from politics or absorbed in it (they become political leaders or senior civil servants).

- Legislative bodies and courts play a secondary role.

- Government bureaucracy is weak and fails to counterbalance the main weaknesses of the other public-policy making units.

- The role of parties in public-policy making is shaped both by the ideological nature of the state and its stage of social development.

- Universities play little, if any role because of the alienation of intellectuals mentioned above.

- Interest groups tend to be fewer. They are also less pluralistic than, and lack the information content of, interest group arguments in developed countries. Here, influence is exerted mainly by means of personal relations and clientelist relationships.

Dror didn't mention the churches in his list, especially the organized religions, but since I believe that they play an important role in socialization, their impact, although indirect, should be expected to be greater than all the above. The evidence, however, is to the contrary. While governments do refer to religious beliefs and some individuals within government profess to be strong adherents, there is often a disconnect between religious and moral values and many of the choices made by governments.

The list also does not include the press, the Fifth Estate or civil society organisations unless the latter were included under "interest groups". I understand that NGO's in Trinidad and Tobago hope to make an even greater contribution in the future to the processes of policy formulation and decision-making and I look forward to witnessing the results of that development.

DROR, Yehezkel (1968). Public policy reexamined. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing.
..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

External Influences, Internal Weaknesses

The most disturbing tendency which can be observed more readily today is the need of many leaders of developing countries to 'belong', to buy into global trends and practice. Because they have become alienated from that which is native or more appropriate, they value the external sometimes just for the fact that it has originated 'outside'. Again, this is a symptom of imperfect information, imperfect knowledge and biased intelligence.

Hamelink (1983:5) refers to the phenomenon of cultural synchronization as the cultural arm of the old project to maintain the dependency structure of the metropolis-satellite arrangement.

"Exogenous influence may be imposed on the receiving cultural systems or it may be actively invited by them...a particular type of cultural development in the metropolitan country is persuasively communicated to the receiving countries (and) the traffic of cultural products goes massively in one direction and has basically a synchronic mode."

This becomes particularly reprehensible when it is used to destabilize a government which is trying to work out a destiny which is more appropriate to its own environment. The ongoing impasse between Cuba and the United States of America is not as illogical as it may seem to those who wonder why it persists even so long after the demise of the Cold War. The United States of America seems to have adopted the wardship principle in claiming to be defending the right to democracy for Cubans and on behalf of Cubans, in order to justify its own imperialist determination to see Cuba synchronized. If nothing positive (and this is an impossibility) could be said about Cuba's achievements, one would have to admire its determination thus far to intervene in its internal and external environments on its own terms.

"In the immediate decades ahead we face the growing prospect of having to change the most fundamental aspects of our belief system and patterns of social life. The challenge will be to see through the illusions of a consumer oriented, technologically based existence, to alter the premises upon which the belief system of the dominant culture is based, and to retain those aspects of our past cultural achievement that are compatible with a culture in equilibrium, with the carrying capacity of the natural systems that make up the biosphere....We face the tragic prospect of the next generation being caught in a conceptual double bind where the ability to understand the problem will be dependent upon the same patterns of thought partly responsible for the scope of the crisis"(Bowers 1993: 9-10, 32)

BOWERS, C.A. (1993). Education, cultural myths and the ecological crisis: Toward deep changes. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.
HAMELINK, Cees J. (1983) Cultural autonomy in global communications: Planning national information policy. New York: Longman.

..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Informational Pathologies Of Policy Making

In their book, "The Pathology of Public Policy", Hogwood and Peters (1985:63-86) developed the metaphor first used by Deutsch (1963) in his book "The Nerves of Government" and outlined what they saw as the pathological features which processes of information collection by governments can exhibit. These provided a tidy summary of the problems that information policy should address and with which the very process of information policy formulation will be stricken. This medical metaphor becomes particularly appropriate if we take a systems approach to organization whether at the level of the individual, the society or government.

Faulty Receptors: More often than not, government becomes aware of problems too late to act upon them in the optimal way. While the feeling of the general public may be that the government does not wish to have this information because it does not wish to act, this is the situation which exists, whatever the reason, and it must be addressed by the information policy. The failure to design aggressive information collection procedures in advance leads to inadequate information, or more than adequate disinformation or an overload of undigested information, being available when problems reach a head.

Failures in Communicating Information to Decision Makers: Much of the information that is in fact collected never reaches the parts of the organization which would find it useful, either because these parts and even the hosts of the information are not aware of the existence of the information or it is not in a format which is readily accessible.

Lack of a Unitary Brain in the Policy Process: There is a high degree of sectorization throughout government departments and this results in unsatisfactory decision-making. It is only when there is a conflict of a clear-cut kind that integrative decision-making mechanisms tend to come into play and when they need to get a particular issue off the agenda.

Faulty Nerve Signals to Muscles: Decisions are not self-implementing. They have to be communicated in operationable form to those who will be responsible for carrying out the necessary tasks. There is no system in place to ensure that decisions will be implemented in the way that they were intended, if they are in fact implemented. There is faulty flow between the decision-makers and implementors and information failures in reaching policy targets.

Learning Disabilities: The ability to secure feedback about the effects of policies is crucial to the whole operation of delivering effective policies over time. It is only through feedback that the organization can learn how its policies are affecting society and whether these should be continued, altered or terminated.

Failures of Memory: Devising means of ensuring access to policy-relevant information about the past is particularly difficult. Even in cases where an organization is considering a policy parallel to one it has operated in the past, memory will fail completely. Such failures lead to duplication of effort and repetition of mistakes because appropriate lessons from the past are not drawn and/or not remembered.

There is either a lack of recognition, or a deliberate refusal to respond to the need to search for records of possible relevant experience. Hogwood and Peters (1985: 84) see this problem being compounded by the fact that raw data from the past may be available in a format that is not readily accessible, for example, it may not have been summarized. Finally they list another type of memory failure as the failure to recognize that there is a memory. Very often policy-makers set out with an artificial tabula rasa hoping to start all over again for the first time.

There is a bottomless pit into which time and money and patience and countless resources disappear without a trace or requiem . I call it the graveyard of reinvented wheels.

DEUTSCH, Karl Wolfgang (1963). The nerves of government. N.Y. : Free Press.
HOGWOOD, Brian W. & PETERS, b. Guy (1985). The pathology of public policy. Oxford: Clarendon.
..............................................................................................................................

"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

Leaders As Obstacles

One of the factors which make transformative politics and the cultivation of intelligence to assist and maintain the process even more difficult, is the government.

Sometimes the obvious is left unsaid, and that is that national leaders and their bureaucracies are the largest, most intractable obstacles on the path of progress. Let us conclude along with Dror(1987:212) that

"a highly advanced intelligence capacity can make a leader uncomfortable for it forces him to discipline his thinking, leaves less leeway for exercising personal will and generally restrains his freedom of action."

The exigencies of office make it more feasible for these persons to focus on outward shows that will increase the possibility of re-election, with no genuine intention to follow through, and the extreme likelihood that policies implemented by one regime will be overthrown by its successor. Often this has manifested itself in the purchase of impressive physical plant/infrastructure, the hiring of foreign 'experts' and the spouting of terms like-"the cutting edge of technology", "state of the art"- without a clue about how imported technology can contribute to relevant, sustainable development.

To summarise, there is an emphasis on acquiring hardware rather than the time and intelligence-intensive process of developing the software of sophisticated minds.

The information policy of a country is largely predicated on the system of government. We have been described as having hosted a succession of paternalistic governments where you can say the Father/Mother of the Nation replaced the Mother Country. The people, playing the role of the bug-eyed children, are expected only to hand up their votes, shut up and behave themselves. Empowerment of the population is problematic for centralized control and governmental carte blanche. The information culture reflects this non-participatory, hierarchical system. It is characterized by two flows:- a top down flow from government to governed and a horizontal swirl of intrigue, gossip, propaganda, innuendoes, hearsay among the governed (the latter being tapped by the government to gain local political advantage.)

Ventura(1980:4) makes a similar observation about developing countries:

"An outstanding characteristic of developing countries is their astonishing lack of knowledge: about themselves, their friends, their enemies and their technological, social, economic and ecological environments."

The implications of this become more serious as these countries attempt to enter the global arena and are increasingly exposed as borders become more permeable to flows of citizens, friends, enemies and the accompanying technological, social, economic and ecological influences.

DROR, Yehezkel (1968). Public policy re-examined. San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing.
VENTURA, Arnaldo (1980). Obstacles and avenues to social enlightenment. Paris: OECD. (Meeting on the Knowledge Industry and the Process of Development, Paris, 9-12 June, 1980)

...............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

The Consciously Ignorant

According to Reser & Smithson (1988:13) uncertainty and ignorance do not always have dysfunctional psycho-social consequences and a great deal of normal human functioning depends crucially upon the creation and uses of ignorance.

For many citizens of both developed and developing countries where dysfunctional psycho-socio-political systems are perpetuated, ignorance is valid currency. The list of misinformation and gaps in basic knowledge is as impressive in its scope as it is ominous for the well-being of the democratic process. (Bowers 1993: 40)

This ignorance is the crucial support which enables ordinary people to get on with everyday life in the face of what they conceive as insurmountable ills. It is the numbing wand with which their leaders control without much fear of reprisal.

Reser & Smithson (1988) use as their case study, the nuclear threat and 'collaborative not dealing with' the issue as a way of coping with the horror of the situation and as a plausible excuse for not becoming involved in the nuclear debate. A valuable insight which they provide explains why in some situations, information or resulting knowledge may not yield beneficial consequences. Knowledge does not always mean empowerment.

If citizens sense an absence of a framework for translating knowledge into affirmative action then ignorance may actually become a source of comfort. Secondly "knowledge itself may exact costs in addition to the time and effort required to obtain it, i.e. the attribution of responsibility for one's own choices." (Reser & Smithson 1988:19).

Citizens may and do find relief in passing on responsibility for crucial decisions to those who profess to have more expertise, even if they suspect that this expertise is non-existent or underemployed.

BOWERS, C.A. (1993). Education, cultural myths and the ecological crisis: Toward deep changes. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.
RESER, Joseph P & SMITHSON, Michael J. (Winter 1988-1989). When ignorance is adaptive: Not knowing about the nuclear threat. Knowledge in Society, 1(4), 7-27
..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

When Religion Replaces Intelligence

“Faud[sic].. Manning does not have to answer to anyone, he is the "Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago,"…….. As long as he has God on his side now, we need to understand the changes that need to take place for all this to happen. Stop living in the past and begin to embrace change, or you will prove to the populace that you are one with something to hide? Fight your battles on your knees!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The quote above is an excerpt from an anonymous reader’s reaction to
"Fuad: Manning must answer" Trinidad & Tobago Express | Monday October 16, 2006.

The article was about Barataria/San Juan MP, Dr Fuad Khan’s call for a Commission of Enquiry into the attempted coup of 1990 in response to Prime Minister Manning’s recent admission that he had advance knowledge of the attempted coup.

Multiply the blind denial of the reader's sentiment by at most four hundred thousand and you have the makings of an eternity of spinning top in mud, the likes of which we have never dreamed ourselves capable. But maybe our bellies are stronger than we imagined or, like hogs, mud is we ting.

God is on the Prime Minister’s side?
I am not at all comfortable with anyone who claims to or is said to have God on his/her side. That always seems very cart-before-the-horse to me. To say that is to imagine that this omnipotent entity is a force that can be co-opted to serve an individual’s or a country’s interests. The last leader to the North to make such a claim has been performing in anything but a godly manner.

A leader does not have to answer to anyone?
Does anyone understand that WE put our leader in power? Do we comprehend that WE hired him, like any employer hires an employee, to do a job? Has it ever dawned on us that just as we have to answer to our bosses, our leader has to answer to us?

Stop living in the past?
To use a very ordinary example, when our children come to us with poor grades on their report cards, don’t we want our children to explain why they find themselves in this situation. Doesn’t this include examining the past so that we can make plans on how to address the problems in the present so that there will be an improvement in the future. Doesn’t everything have a past, present and future? How can we evolve if we don’t examine the past that affects our present and will determine our future?

Embrace change?
What is informing this change? A brand new team? A newly found intelligence, and that along with the acquisition of God as a star player?

Fight your battles on your knees?
Hmm...I think I will bow out here and let other minds take over:

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish. ~Unknown

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. ~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

This doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind. ~ Herbert J. Muller

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. ~ Virgil

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings. ~ Helen Keller

Jesus did not die at the hands of muggers, rapists, or thugs. He fell into the well-scrubbed hands of deeply religious people, society's most respected members. ~ Brennan Manning

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~Blaise Pascal

Let's quit fiddling with religion and do something to bring the world to Christ.~ Billy Sunday

Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that shall not be made known. What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in the light and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. ~ Matthew 10:26-27

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. ~ Ephesians 5:11

and to end on a lighter note:

Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine. ~ Austin O'Malley

..............................................................................................................................
"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare