THE EDITOR: When first I read the story, I let out one long, watery steups of the kind that would have made Randall Mitchell very proud.
I could not believe that a newspaper which prides itself as being the oldest in the country, which trumpets itself as a guardian of sorts, saw it fit to have as its lead story, something about what a woman said at the AGM of a private business entity, about overseas training courses, during which, participants were taught to commune with the dead.
I mean, really?
In a country beset and besieged by criminals, incompetent MPs and ministers, a crumbling national infrastructure, general poverty and hopelessness, all that this newspaper could see fit to put on its front page, was a story of shirt-and-tie executives learning the art of talking to the dead?
I don't know which was worse, the story or the decision to put it in print in the first place.
We in TT, including some sections of our media, clearly have our priorities all wrong.
You see evidence of this daily.
People struggling to get through with the high cost of food and bills, yet who are willing to splurge on ham and grog and gifts for the Yuletide Season. Then these very same people are crying long tears when they are forced to wear ashes and sackcloth during the 90 days of January.
People religiously save their money every year, not for a car or a house or studies, but for a $5,000 costume in order to showcase their physical attributes, while jumping up for two days in our Carnival. Yet these same people will cuss when they see their bills. Wrong priority.
A government will open swimming pools all over the country while for many thousands, there is no reliable running water in their taps.
Millions spent on these same swimming pools, while the roads one would have to traverse to get to these pools, are covered in potholes – some deep enough as to present a clear and present danger to life and limb, and tyre and axle.
And then there is this particular media outlet which assaulted our senses with a non-story plastered on its front page.
But wait a minute. Come to think of it, this is beginning to make sense to me. This media outlet is part of a conglomerate that is a direct competitor to the very same group that – according to the story – sent its executives away to learn how to speak to dead people. Hmmmm.
Ok, I concede. So maybe there was actually some corporate method behind the madness of using such a nonsensical story as that newspaper's lead.
It still doesn't change the fact that too many people and institutions have their priorities all wrong in this country. And until we as a people get our act and our priorities together, things and institutions just won't function properly or in the the way that we expect them to.
LEE MERRICK
San Fernando
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