Send in the Robots

For fresh fruit and vegetables in Banjul I usually head for roadside stalls. They stock an abundance of produce loaded with the 5- or 7- a day substances that everyone says is good for you. And, as I make my way towards my favorite stalls my sense of anticipation grows not just for the buying but also for the gossip and banter. They ask about my family and I do the same about theirs, while I feign shock and horror at the prices they throw at me. The scene is usually further enlivened by the antics of one or two toddlers weaving their way among the stalls, occupied in their play, uncaring about the mischief they might create in occasionally upsetting their mothers’ pyramids of oranges, mangoes and avocados. 

          So, when on my recent trip to the city I went to my favorite vendor to get my fruit and veg and asked about the whereabouts of one of those toddlers, little Fouad, and his mother told me that he had “passed on a few months back”, I was absolutely gutted. For that boy, with a large cranium, mischievous eyes and quick movements, all attributes of an intelligent mind, not to say sound body, to have "passed away" just like that was beyond my comprehension. What made it even more difficult to comprehend was that the enormity of this scandal seemed not to have discomposed the mother at all. Putting the issue of PTSD aside, in answer to my question as to how that death had come about, the mother merely said, “It just happened. These things happen.” Indeed they do, but they need not. 

What is the use of all this big international exercise about defining millennium development goals and targets and failing so lamentably when it came to protecting a healthy four-year-old and depriving the world of a potential genius? Loving parental care, it seemed was not sufficient to the task. It got me thinking that a robot, properly programmed, could have done a better job. And this was on the day that we learnt that a co-pilot had locked his captain out of the cockpit of a passenger airliner and deliberately crashed it into the side of a French Alps, killing himself and 149 others. Such a catastrophe should be preventable in this day and age, I would suggest. If we can land a Philae-Rosetta probe on a moving lump of ice after a 10-year journey through untold millions of kilometers, and the dodging all kinds of celestial clutter, surely we can frustrate a rogue pilot bent on crashing his plane against the side of a mountain on this here earth.

Tell Fren Tru

Who Will Mind Us?

It used to be that the gap between the generations was one just of language. One imagines that soon after language evolved, children’s talk began to deviate from the way their parents spoke, leaving parents perplexed. And children, by the same token, must, on occasion, have failed to comprehend what their parents were going on about. We accept that. But now, though, it seems that a resentful distrust smoulders between the generations, encouraged more by chatter than anything else.

What came first? Did we know we had a generation issue prior to being told by some pundit that we had one, or did the revelation come about as a result of our being groomed to see how things stand? 

Commentators have identified the Baby Boomer generation, comprised of those born in the years immediately following WW II as the signal generation of recent decades. These Boomers, were the offspring of those who had lived during the Great Depression that had had to scrimp and save, and who then had to go to fight and die in the war.  The Boomers were lucky. They were in the right place at the right time, reaching maturity just when the economies of the western world were beginning to deliver. Boomers found the ways and means to make it, and they did, manoeuvring themselves into an assured mastery of the universe. Outsiders could only stand and gape.

Now that Boomers are entering their seventh decades, they do not easily relinquish territory. Instead, they reinvent themselves as ‘Zoomers’, who remain every bit as acquisitive as in their initial incarnation.

But the children of the Boomer/Zoomer generation are not without their own ambition, reinforced by that 21^st century characteristic, “attitude”. Even the way they are designated, all sharp angles, speaks for itself: ‘Generation X,’ ‘Generation Y’, ‘Generation Z’. All bunched together, they are a formidable force demanding attention. However, they do have a soft centre consisting of the ‘Squeezed generation’ located in an in-between territory whose borders are defined by now-dependent parents and still-juvenile children. Where were this generation previously? They have always been there in plain sight, carrying on quietly with Grandpa and Grandma, Dad, and Junior, all living comfortably together in the same space where everyone’s needs were met. Modern life has disrupted this cosy arrangement, dispersing the generations into multiple households the care for which now defaults to the Squeezed Ones.

This rebalancing of the burden of care is becoming the norm in countries where life expectancy is surging upwards, men living into their late 70’s and women into their 80’s. Some of us should be grateful, I suppose, but the Squeezed Ones are certainly not the pleased ones. 

It is good though that the social state does carry some of the burden, using tax on the wages of the working young, in the so-called pay-as-you-go arrangement by which some maintenance is provided the elderly. I was surprised to learn about this arrangement recently because I had always thought that the little bits we pay as social security insurance went into a pool that the government invests for us for our retirement. That is not exactly the case.

In the end, bills have to be paid, wherever we are in the cycle. What is clear is that our little children are the most vulnerable. They have nothing, except their boundless potential. Therefore, our duty is clear. Protect and nurture them, so that in adulthood, they would be capable of looking after themselves. And us too.

Tell Fren Tru

Mind That Gap

What Ebola has done is to kick us out of our complacency. Before the virus, we were convinced that everything was A OK, sequestered as we were in our private worlds, heads clamped between earphones, faculties numbed by streams of mood music.

Then Ebola struck, first, as an unremarked event in a remote forest village in the Guinea forest. Then, gathering pace, it swept through the countryside, making its way across borders to towns and, finally, laying capital cities to waste.  It was only then that its urgency grabbed us by the shirt fronts, so to speak, forcing us to admit, with reluctance, dissimulations and sometimes outright lies that we had a problem. The question as to who or what caused the outbreak was one that was going to run its own bizarre course.

          For the time being though, the issue was how to interrupt the progress of a catastrophe that was unfolding. In spite of all the misinformation, mostly from non-credible quarters, clear thinking eventually took charge and assured us that Ebola was not an untameable beast; that it was just another natural phenomenon that could be tackled along two separate but related lines: One was how to manage the sick and dying (and the dead, of course); and the the other, how to stop the currently unaffected becoming infected. 

          Dealing with these two issues required resources of people and material, neither of which grows on trees. And even if they did, a quantum of time would have been required for a harvest. In those critical days, time there was not. But, after the slow start, mobilization along several fronts took place, with thousands being deployed, together with matching supplies and equipment. Initially, the deployment seemed to have had very little effect, creating the impression that nothing was being done or that we were helpless. Doomsday predictions of hundreds of thousands of cases became common. But gradually, the multi-pronged response began to have an effect: Lack of knowledge of the epidemiology of the disease among the at-risk public was made good and facilities for management of affected patients sprung up at critical sites, so that by the end of the twelfth month in the epidemic’s course, it looked as if the beast that had sprung out of the undergrowth was about to be tamed. 

          In countries where basic social services were already in an abominable state, the challenge was where and how to find the funds for a rapid and effective mobilization. But, in due course, the necessary money was pledged and even delivered. Now, several months down the line, there is even talk that there is so much money, that more than half of it has not been used (donations)

Where did all the money come from? Well, the bulk came from the governments of rich countries and foundations that were unable to stand by and watch whole nations and their peoples go down the tube. 

But some of the money also came from individuals who normally, for various reasons, don’t care about contributing to public issues, serious or otherwise. In this instance, however, we too, dug deep. And well we should have because, although we don’t know or feel it, we are evidently among the privileged few. That is, among the one-percent of the world’s population who own half the planet’s wealth according to the charity, Oxfam. Consider that! Only 70 million people in the world own half of it (Inequality).

As usual, it is difficult to know how such figures are arrived at and whether to rely on them or not. But the assertion is being repeated all over the place, so one must suppose that it is true. If so, is it harmful? You bet it is. But how do we change things? I suppose we must turn again to powerful governments in the countries where the really rich live. They are the ones who control the world’s fortunes. Trouble is, these people keep their money in off-shore banks, beyond the reach of the tax man, evidently with the connivance of their political leaders. And unless and until this corrosive axis is uncoupled, the gap between the rich and ordinary folk will remain and almost certainly widen. 

The real victims in this alliance though, are people in poor countries, whose governments might believe that they too, have been granted licence to deal dirty. 

New and emerging diseases meanwhile watch with delight and bide their time.

Tell Fren Tru