In my May 22 2000 column I wrote about my phone conversation with Romeo Effs about his work with Food For The Poor. Romeo spoke passionately about the personal satisfaction he got from helping the less fortunate and the inspiration FTTP founder Ferdinand Mahfood had been to him.

It did it again. Every time I decide to give up completely on West Indies cricket another thrilling drama drags me back into the camp. In 1999 it was the magnificence of Brian Lara at Sabina Park and Kensington Oval. Last year it was the thrilling one wicket win over Pakistan (though the umpires really gave that match to the Windies). And Saturday it was Ridley Jacob’s last ball heroics at Sabina Park.

When I came back to live in Jamaica in 1989 after being away at school for over a decade I used to wonder how a land so God blessed with natural resources could be so poor. Having lived and done business here for twelve years I now wonder how a country so lackadaisical and careless has not sunk under the sea.

Jamaica is not a country of comfortable certainties. Take the recent Braeton shootings where police killed seven youths. Like most people my first reaction was “Yes, seven gunmen less on the streets!” But when some reports cast doubts on the police version of events I began to wonder if it had indeed been a case of extra judicial murder.

Black history month is a natural time to celebrate Jamaica’s national heroes, and to discuss possible additions to the official pantheon. Now there are those who argue that the entire concept of national heroes is unnecessary. But the truth is that every nation needs figures of excellence who their countrymen can look up to and admire, of whom they can say “They are great, but I am like them and they are like me”. In countries with long and rich histories such figures are thrown up naturally and there may be no need for official recognition. The British government for example certainly does not need to tell its youth that Shakespeare, Newton and Churchill are great men. But in small young countries like Jamaica there is certainly a strong case for the official nurturing of heroes. Would those who argue against national heroes be happy if our youngsters had only foreigners to emulate?

“There’s no humourist like history” the American author Will Durant once wrote, a truth confirmed yet again by recent events in Cuba. Who in the heyday of communist solidarity could have predicted that then staunch “socialist” allies Cuba and the Czech Republic would one day be embroiled in a human rights controversy? But last month Cuban authorities jailed two Czech citizens on charges of subversion. Their “crime” was meeting Cuban dissidents. Predictably Cuban officials condemned the two men as “American agents” and the dissidents as “counter-revolutionaries”.

“When I grow up I want Jamaica to be a first world country” says a child in a popular billboard ad. To most people of course “first world” means rich, though in concrete terms it basically covers Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and maybe Singapore, Hong Kong, and Israel.

To many it is an ethically repugnant system based primarily on human selfishness and greed. But market capitalism is unquestionably the most successful economic system ever invented. It has given the western world the highest material standard of living in human history and made the United States in particular the richest, most technologically advanced and most powerful nation of all time.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind? 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o’ lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my dear

For auld lang syne,

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet

For auld lang syne!”

Christmas is at once the most hedonistic, commercialized, and holiest time of the year. Technically it is Easter Sunday – the day of resurrection - and not Christmas which is supposed to be the most important Christian day. Yet even devout churchgoers generally pay more attention to Christmas than Easter. And resent as they may the calendar expectation of happiness, even humbug scrooges find it hard to completely resist its spirit brightening festivities and gift exchanging pleasures. It says much about man’s paradoxical nature that this mix of deity, merry making, and mammon is the focal point of our calendar.