Now, as the nation makes preparation for celebrating the third Yuletide of the new millennium, the concerns and delights of the early 1970s Guyana seem light years away. And perhaps they are. The entire world has changed and although Guyana is still a Third World country grappling with the challenges of modernising the state and converting huge lodes of untapped natural wealth into income-earning foreign exports, it is also a country linked to international agencies and centres of industry through the miracle of state-of-the-art communications. He might be living in a crude hut, but even the poorest tiller of the soil in Guyana enjoys the pastime of witnessing such riveting and dramatic happenings as the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia; World Cup Football in Asia; the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001; and, just last Sunday, the capture of the deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In this moment of our civilisation, schoolchildren wear designer sneakers that cost more dollar-for-dollar than what their grandparents earned in six months 30 years ago; children seem to be far more precocious than the last generation; some defiant young teens and even pre-teens have lovers and are sexually active and more intelligent young people from relatively good home environments are easily persuaded to become drug mules for rapacious drug lords. While some youths are incarcerated when discovered transporting quantities of drugs, others, who were persuaded to ingest the substances in various packets have paid for their folly with their lives. The HIV/AIDS scourge is claiming the lives of youths as well as older citizens. The stigma society attaches to the disease forces many a person to keep quiet about their illness until it is too late. Thankfully, with the current availability of anti-retrovirals, which slow down the march of the disease and help victims live a fairly normal life, this threat will soon be under control.

But, perhaps the greatest occurrence of this time is what the social theorists term the explosion of information via the worldwide web. With a computer linked to an Internet provider, the seeker of information has the world literally at his or her fingertips, or as the advertisement says, “Just a click away”. One could stay in the comfort of one’s home and communicate with another person or agency at the other end of the world. Citizens could access any Website or correspond with relatives, friends or workmates without uttering a word. Corporate employees could prepare and dispatch critical documents to their principals without the intervention of other parties. Corporate executives could conduct teleconferences with partners at various points of the planet; and students could access lectures and tutorials and resources information with relative ease.