Understand, it will happen to everyone if they live long enough. I don’t have a direct line to Claudia Cayetano, so I can’t ask her the pertinent questions. Kathy Esquivel has some knowledge of these things but I wouldn’t expect her to talk. In the land of the blind the man with one eye is king. In the absence of the experts, the least inexpert is a sage.
From my observation, and a little research, no longer being at the top of one’s game can be caused by age-degenerative diseases, mental life traumas (aka stress), physical life traumas (blows to the head), and “sedentarism.” That last one, the doctors won’t call it out because there’s no money in it for them. The sedentary life just happens to be the worst enemy of all animal life. A couch potato is a rotten potato.
I absolutely mean no harm.It’s no great shame to be losing it. It happens to everyone if they live long enough. If you have oldsters in your family (if you are lucky enough to have them), you will note how much effort they put in to stay on top of their affairs. Names and dates and places and events that were in the forefront, they put up a fight so they don’t start slipping to the back of the head. I repeat that it’s no great shame. But if one is in a leadership position, it could be troublesome.
The Americans (them) have some special tests for their leaders. They know how important it is for leaders to have their full faculties. We, and they, share a common past with the British, but they are more familiar with the territory because they are white and were never real outcasts. Cutting straight to the point, they had a front row seat to observe what happened when a monarch in England was no longer fit for office. That is why they, the Americans, cut their leaders very little slack.
We really are too soft with our leaders. Once upon a time our leaders were British, and they had their sedition laws and military might to keep us from questioning too much. Change was supposed to come when we took charge of our country. It didn’t. In fact, local leaders are worse with their use of tactics to instill fear in our people. They use tactics that apply to dictatorships and monarchies, in our democratic state.
Last year, in December, there was this story in the Amandala, by Albert J. Ciego, “Hon. Sedi forgets agreement with Oleander residents.” In this story, Natalie Adolphus explained that Elrington” passed her and her neighbors over when he selected families who would get to live in a new apartment building built right in front of theirs… Several fortunate families will get to live in the new building, while Natalie’s family and the other four families continue to struggle in their dilapidated barracks.”
Natalie and her neighbors thought they had an agreement with Elrington, and she said, “she and her neighbors cooperated with the contractor, and assisted him and his workers by providing electricity for their power tools, and other things they required,” and that “when the workers went home, they (she and her neighbors) ‘watched’ the site and the equipment.” Natalie said “all of them thought the new building would be their new home upon its completion. However, after the building was completed they got the disappointing news.”
The next worrying episode in Elrington’s recent life is an unbelievable case at the CCJ. In a July (2017) story in the Amandala, by Micah Goodin, we learned that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) had ordered Elrington’s law firm to return “land titles owned by his former client, Progresso Heights Limited, within the next thirty days.”
In the story, titled “Hon. Sedi Elrington must return land titles worth almost $1 million to former client, orders CCJ”, we learned that Elrington’s law firm had received 18 land title transfers from a real estate company for processing. When the media questioned Elrington about the documents, he said, “Our position is that we don’t have the documents. We never had it… I have no knowledge of my office receiving them.”
Attorney Eamon Courtenay, who represented the real estate agents, told the Amandala reporter that “the CCJ sided with his clients because they were able to provide evidence showing that monies were deposited in Elrington’s US bank accounts, and that the documents were mailed to his law firm.”
If you are lost at this time, confounded or confused, draw a deep breath, for what is coming next will absolutely leave you with your mouth hanging open. When he explained how we lost the UHS case at the CCJ, Elrington said (heard it on KREM News), that sometimes the facts get MISREPRESENTED!
Really, there’s a reason why people with clean hands pay big money to lawyers. They pay big money to lawyers just so the facts don’t get MISREPRESENTED at court.We had TEN whopping years to prepare our case, and then the wily enemy got over us with misrepresented facts.
Foreign stories
Natasha Brooks of onegreenplanet.org/ wrote on June 22, 2018 that “Due to plummeting demand for dairy milk, 52 New York dairy farms have lost their wholesale contracts and have no one lined up to buy their milk beginning this July.” She said that a CBS story claims that “the average American drinks 37 percent less milk now than they did in 1970.” She said the “rise in demand for milk alternatives is so high that the global dairy-free milk market is expected to reach $14.4 billion by 2020.”
Brooks noted that “meat giants Tyson and Cargill have invested in lab-grown meat, recognizing that the future of food is rapidly changing.” This story, the one about the lab-grown meat, if that doesn’t make you feel like “vomit,” then your intestines are lined with cast iron. The Greens are wonderful people, but everyone left to their devices, unchecked, will go too far. For health and environment reasons it is great that milk alternatives like soy, almond, coconut, oats and such are coming on the market. But lab-grown meat is for Frankenstein.
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In one of the memorable scenes in “The Learning Tree”, Big Mabel, a nightclub girl, rescues young Newt from a tornado, and cares for him. Newt’s male pals pester him about it, want to find out more, but Newt is an honorable lad and he keeps to himself what he ought to keep to himself. Hooray for Newt!
Some of us, we feel like the world has been ripped from under our feet when we see a young man named Jimmy Bennett getting respect for outing and scandalizing an older woman who committed an indiscretion. Oh, if Newt could jump out of Learning Tree and go an punch Jimmy Bennett in his mouth.
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Ahem, I can’t express how relieved I was when I learned that Naomi Osaka’s dad isn’t Jamaican. I had read previously, a year or so ago, that her father was from there. Naomi’s a fantastic girl, and a fantastic tennis player, and one of my favorites. Okay, I just preferred that her dad come from a small island, not from Belize’s capital, Jamaica. Hooray, during the ceremonies after she won the US Open, while her family was celebrating, I learned that the dad was by way of Toussaint country, Haiti. Hooray!
You know that Belize football only has one mission in the Caribbean, and that is to beat dem Reggae Boyz.
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A lot of people who follow international football will tell you the most special player on the planet at this time is French midfielder, Paul Pogba. He just doesn’t show up every game because he doesn’t have that something inside to drive him to want to be his best all the time. But during the recent World Cup in Russia, Pogba had a mission.
Pogba is a man who is known to change hair styles just about as often as people into fashion change their clothes. Matt Storey wrote on Yahoo sports that various pundits have criticized him for “focusing on his looks, rather than his game”, but Pogba’s hair style “remained the same throughout the five-week tournament.” Pogba admitted that he decided “to tone down his style whilst on national duty.” On his Instagram, he explained: “Because I wanted peace to be only focus on my performance and not my look so there is no excuse they could only criticize the football part.”
That noted, without getting involved in the details of the recent hair story that resulted in some boys being locked outside the gate at Nazarene High School, I support every school’s right to determine how their male youth wear their hair. If the school demands a peeli, you know how they do it in Rome.