Ian McDonald MAKING RESOLUTIONS in a new year is an exercise in futility. Resolutions so made are not kept for long. The only resolutions we are likely to be serious about are those imposed by fear of imminent catastrophe like when a doctor strongly advises loss of weight and exercise after a heart attack which you have been lucky enough to survive or when a bank manager summons you to a "friendly" meeting about a loan long in arrears. Any resolution made under the artificial pressure simply of a new date is 'soft' and will not be kept.
But as a new year gets going let us at least take note of some principles of living one can vow not to forget as the days pass and there is so much to lead us astray, mislead our judgement, undermine our better convictions and tempt us into selfishness and negativity.
Remember that Gross National Product is a completely inadequate yardstick by which to judge success or contentment in a nation. To put it shortly, such measurement assumes that man lives by bread alone, that material wealth is all that counts. But compare the following: on the one hand twenty millionaires in twenty luxury apartments each dining alone or with a bejewelled mistress on tender fillet steak and vintage wine served by immaculately dressed butlers; on the other hand a poor but cheerful extended family, aged grandparents to infant children gathered together, enjoying a giant convivial meal together of good curry and rice washed down by tumblers of home-made drink. The one represents tens of millions of GNP, the other a couple of thousand. But which stands higher in the scale of real human values?
GNP cannot measure most of the things that are really valuable. How do you count in GNP, in these days of pollution, the blessing of fresh air and bright skies? The warmth and hospitality of a people adds to GNP not one iota more than a cold self-centredness and brutal selfishness. How many poems and songs and paintings does it take to add one percentage point to GNP? Safe streets and safe homes do not figure as a plus in GNP. GNP can never reflect how independent, how free, how cultured, how humane, how, in the best sense, advanced a society really is. The fact is that GNP is grossly misleading as an indicator of what we could perhaps call TNW True National Wealth. And TNW would have to be calculated on a very different basis. That proportion of national resources and effort expended on arms, for instance, would be deducted, not added, to the sum. The quicker the whole world measures by a TNW, not a GNP, yardstick, the quicker humanity will make real progress.
I feel the need to repeat a belief expressed in a column not long ago, that we should never yield to across-the-board, knee-jerk negativity. The great sin to fight is "a refusal to be pleased," with its sour determination always to find fault, always to look on the gloomy side of things, always to seek out the worst in people. The simple fact is that we have a duty not only to try and create good standards of personal performance and behaviour around our own lives, but also to enjoy, make the best of, what life offers us day by day and teach our children to do the same. There is really no other sensible way to live.
Let us try to escape from the syndrome of eternal faultfinding. We certainly must speak up strongly when things are wrong - but at the same time I do not think we should ever turn our backs on what is positive or hopeful or promising in our own lives and in the life of the country.
For those in bitter times, for those clinging to not much hope, for those indeed in the depths of genuine, despair and fear and pain, I quote the words of Lance Armstrong, the great American athlete-cyclist who fought and overcame virulent cancer of the testicles, the abdomen, the lungs and the brain:
"I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realised. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.
Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils, of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit. So, I believed."
Ian McDonald is a regular contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
