New frontiers…in academia

Your Eyewitness is getting long in the tooth. He’d suspected as much from the massive changes he was seeing in the society he’d been living in all his long life. But suddenly he feels like he’s a stranger in a strange land!! Take the phenomenon of Scrapeheads – which broke into his consciousness after they were incited to rampage all over GT in the wake of the (first) Adrianna autopsy!! He wondered who’d revel in the notion they knew nothing and didn’t want to know nothing!! Like volcanoes, they’d erupt without any thought – just through whatever was bubbling within at the time.
Philosophers had made the distinction between “actions” and “events” – the latter just occur spontaneously, while the former’s mediated by thought. But here it was – the distinction between humans and the elements was gone!! And what made your Eyewitness do an even bigger double-take was when a bunch of political wannabes descended at the scene of the Adrianna tragedy. One of them – a business type who was soon to morph into Chicken Man of the PNC – confessed he’d been a Scrapehead in his youth!! Imagine that!! It was like waking up in that movie “The Night of the Living Dead”!! Who knows what lurks in the body of your neighbours!??! No wonder we’ve got all this road rage playing out on our roads!!
Anyhow, as your Eyewitness continued to wrap his head around Scrapes, he looked in at one of the UG graduation exercises dealing with these 3000 bodies in this 2025 cohort. He figured the faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology might offer a glimpse of the old, science-based verities that had kept his generation going!! He never guessed he’d be witnessing another nail in his coffin of irrelevance in this new world.
He heard about a bunch of young folks getting degrees in “Human Resiliency, Strategic Security and the Future”!! “ He did a quick Google search to answer his “What the heck!” exclamation!! The “Key Objectives” of the course were “to observe and study human resilience globally; to PERHAPS develop the discipline of human resiliency systems; to generate research, disseminate knowledge, teaching and policy around the question of human resiliency; around the question of strategic human security; and…around the question of Guyana’s future in the context of humanity’s future and the future of planet earth.
“To provide a common academic space for international multi- and cross-disciplinary partnerships, to galvanise funding and intellectual resources, WHO will work across disciplines, space, time and dimensions in regard to human resilience; and to systematise and institutionalise resilience as a human attribute and practice at all levels of society through teaching and action research, especially amongst the young and those perceived as historically vulnerable.” Whew!!!
Maybe they can focus on Scrapeheads??

…for PNC
As he read about former Mayor Ubraj Narine quitting the PNC executive, the lyrics of that old Queen monster hit flashed into his mind – Another one bites the dust!! “Steve (read Ubraj!) walks warily down the street/ With the brim (turban?) pulled way down low/ Ain’t no sound but the sound of his feet/ Machine guns (his motor mouth?) ready to go/Are you ready/ Hey, are you ready for this? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
“Out of the doorway, the bullets (resignations) rip. To the sound of the beat, yeah/ Another one bites the dust/ Another one bites the dust/ And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust (yeah)!!
“Hey, I’m gonna get you (Black Pudding Man), too.” Another one bites the dust/ How do you (Norton) think (you’re) gonna get along/ Without him, when you’re gone? He took me for everything that I had.
And kicked me out on my own!!”
What goes around…!!

…in pastoring
As your Eyewitness saw that pastor flay a cutlass at a WPA stalwart looking for parking in the New GT, he wondered whether the fella thought he was following Jesus who’d whipped those money changers??