A little encouragement to back to school students: “His way paved, boots too smooth, no friction in his steps; he slipped, stumbled, fell did not get there.” Chasm: That gaping hole and gulf between, and reason to strive; that great motivator to close up divisions, and erase fault lines between where we are, and want to be; between reality and dream. Without chasm; friction to agitate and energise our fortitude—battery of energy force that lights up solution to right and wrong, our worth would fade away. But chasm is elastic; stretching from narrow to wide, up and down everywhere. Narrow chasm yields quicker solution than wide ones like using a boat to cross a river.

Having to get there without a boat, and being unable to swim is a wide chasm; so you learn, then swim to the other side and celebrate a chasm trampled. Same as going back to school this September and sail through those final credits build a graduation bridge to a better future. Am I correct; Steve, John, Sonia, Omar, Peter, Mike, and Tim? Invisible chasm is dangerous; unseen force wall of fear—many use religion to march around to breakdown. But religion creates deadly chasm of disunity in which many perish. Lawyers are trained to dig wide chasm between people same as religion, which causes divisions and riffs. Indeed, without chasm we are weak.

Solving personal and communal chasm strengthens. Fixing and adjusting defines intellectual and social development. Our mind expands one defeated chasm at a time, and once stretched never return to its original size. The riches of our intellectual reservoirs are as the difficulty of chasm fixed. Ship conquered the sea’s chasm, allowing travel among continents within days. But continuing fight, using airplane, reduced the same journey to hours.
The Panama Canal, squeezes the Pacific and Atlantic oceans together is a giant step, but closing the gap between moon and earth is giant leap. Either way, Mount Everest size chasm was beaten flat.

Many lives have been lost defeating chasm, but knowledge increases just the same. In some country, chasm is a burden; long mountain range of grim skyline of despair visible everywhere under dark cloud of famine, economic disparities, diseases and ethnic cleansing, naming only few. You hear it on the radio, see it on television; chasm left alone, festers and grows into malignant champion fists raised in the air; delivering blows suffering, sickness and deaths.
Indeed the surest way to defeat chasm individually and community is education; that basic right and tool; not just to pass exams, but energy to fight stubborn ideas that stymied growth especially in the Caribbean Region.

Guns must be replaced with books and pens. But a good education for the right reason is a mysterious chasm to solve, because it is not just to secure a job and live comfortable, but to help build society, unselfishly. Here is one reason still true in this digital and graphical age:

EDUCATION: “To afford all members of the human race the means of providing for their needs, of securing their welfare, of recognising and fulfilling their duties; to assure for everyone opportunities of perfecting their skills and rendering themselves capable of the social duties to which they have a right to be called; to develop to the utmost the talents with which nature has endowed them and, in so doing, to establish among all citizens a true equality and thus make real the political equality realised by law this should be the primary aim of a national system of education, and from this point of view its establishment is for the public authority an obligation of justice.”

So use education to embrace and defeat your chasm and transform into your greater self. Peace! And back to school September, 2010

Jeffery Wright