There are words for all kinds of fears that we humans have: “phobias” they’re called. There’s that terrifying reaction some of us get when on a great height and fear we’ll fall over at any moment, plunging to our doom: acrophobia. Most common is “claustrophobia” – fear of enclosed spaces like elevators and such like. Well, we just observed “Earth Day”, and from what your Eyewitness can glean from the messages that crossed his feed, there’s a whole lotta folks who fear we humans are destroying planet Earth, on which we live. Is there a word for this fear? Ecophobia.
Your Eyewitness’s personal fear since he was a callow youth was sliding down a bannister which suddenly turns into a razor blade!! You may snicker all you want now, not-so-dear reader, but don’t for a moment think that it was funny. And so it is with your Eyewitness and this fear of us wiping out our planet. He isn’t that het up about the possibility, but doesn’t snicker at those who do. Now, you may ask how could he ignore all the “evidence” provided by those scientists who’ve been studying the matter for decades?
Well, all he can say is that scientists aren’t infallible, are they? And we’ve seen so many of their predictions proven wrong, haven’t we? Wasn’t there that fella named “Malthus”, who predicted back in the 19th century that our population was growing so fast we’d run out of food before the 20th century and all starve to death? There was great wringing of hands, and moaning and groaning by “those who know better”, but hey…we’re still here in the 21st century, aren’t we? And in general, eating much better than old Malthus, thank you!!
Your Eyewitness’s philosophy in dealing with this (unnamed) fear of imminent extinction of our human species is that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Meaning that: whatever challenge we face, our human ingenuity will rise to the occasion to deal with it. As with Malthus’s fear of the consequences of “overpopulation”, folks came up with new varieties of crops like rice and wheat, that yielded many times the quantities of grain than the traditional varieties. The point your Eyewitness wants to make is: we shouldn’t be getting our drawers and bucktas in knots about our Earth; rather, we should ignore those virtue-signalling alarmists, and reward those who can come up with proposals to deal with whatever is destroying Mother Earth.
The theme this year is “Invest in the Earth”. And for us in Guyana, this doesn’t mean we should leave our oil under the Atlantic – as some luddites are preaching. Rather, we should support research and investments that’ll deliver more “cleaner energy”.
…perceptions
One of your Eyewitness’s favourite books from his childhood days (“daze”!?!) is Alice in Wonderland. The challenges Alice confronted once she followed the White Rabbit down that hole might’ve even inspired that bannister-into-razor-blade fear!! Anyhow, there’s one episode where Alice’s size keeps changing and she loses the ability to distinguish between the sizes of objects. It’s like someone who can’t distinguish between the size of a toy cow in their hand and real cows at a distance. No matter how you try to explain the effect of “perspective”, they can’t see that they’re not identical in size!!
Believe it or not, there’s a name for this problem – Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), also known as Todd’s syndrome or dysmetropsia. Your Eyewitness thinks a great many supporters of the PNC are suffering from AIWS. They’ve swallowed the PNC line that whatever minnows-like shenanigans the PPP might’ve pulled during the 2020 elections, they’re equal to the whale-like rigging the PNC attempted!!
How do you treat collective AIWS?
…political attitudes?
Maybe the answer to the question above is unfolding even as we write? To wit, that as the PPP continues with its countrywide blitzkrieg-like development projects that benefit all, the scales will fall from their eyes?
