Become an educated voter

Editor: Most Vincentians can read (maybe), but most Vincentians don’t—a fact. Whether in the newspapers or on the Internet, critical information, relevant to how and why we should vote is ignored by a vast majority of the Vincentian populace. Tell me I’m wrong. An informed electorate is the basis for any democracy. TV news is edited, foreshortened, and positioned to provide a visual entertainment acceptable to advertisers, with a modicum of intellectual content,{{more}} and in a nation where there is only one broadcast TV station, whose licence continues at the sufferance of the Government, its news content must necessarily be circumspect.

The information most of the electorate receives in St Vincent and the Grenadines is via the television and radio (I say, she says, neither of us thinks or considers or reflects or researches—we just “say our mind” — “ignorant ass that I am, here be what I think!”) We will get the government we deserve. What do you think you deserve?

The new (or re-elected old) government will be your voice and your image that we, the electorate of St Vincent and the Grenadines will have chosen to represent us for the next five years. It will be who we are to the world, a reflection of your sense, our sense, of what our Government should be.

Is Ralph Gonsalves who and what this country needs, what you need, what we need, what our children need, to be our country’s moral, economic, and diplomatic representative to the world for the next five years, and to institute the imperative changes in education and medical care and infrastructure modernization and public safety that are so desperately needed, after three terms of failing to effectively and meaningfully deliver on promises in those critical areas? It’s in your hands and fingers when you vote.

Five years from now will you be regretting, again, being ashamed, again, of the Government you elected this year?

Joe