I AM back. Yes, Spark of Law is here again after many years of hiatus.
For the past years, my humble number of readers, mostly friends or relatives though, has been urging me to write again. No less than the prolific sports writer Lynde Salgados encouraged me to write again. He said he missed the critical thinking that goes with my writing, topped with the literary juices, if not frustrations.
Well, I am back not so much for my friends and relatives incorporated but due to the need of more critical analyses of the issues of the day. The issues have been buried in the landscape of fakery in the social media. Lies are being peddled, and repeated several times over, in the hope that the masses will take the lies as gospel truths.
I do not claim to have the monopoly of critical thinking. But I guess my background in philosophy and law, and the many toilet readings I had, devouring small paper packages for salt and sugar, have equipped me to read behind the lines of lies and fallacies.
The broadsheets and tabloids, if they are to survive the onslaught of edited, albeit slanted, social media, must come-up with a better version of themselves. Otherwise, fakery will win the day.
I was numbed when a fellow lawyer argued that the three lawyers who were arrested during a police raid committed obstruction of justice because of the video that was spread in the internet showing that the three lawyers made threats to the raiding team.
A critical mind will prompt immediately that the video, in our age and technology, can easily be edited. We cannot simply rely on what we read , hear, and see. Imagine, a raiding team comes to the house, armed to the teeth, with long arms and pistols. Often times, their demeanor is as menacing as their war gears. And you have three very young lawyers, well into their first few years of law practice. Experience and life tell us that between the two protagonists, it is the raiding team that has the propensity for spewing expletives and threats.
Critical analysis requires more imagination, not based on the ivory towers of the universities, but in the bigger school called life and experience.
A decade ago, the column came into existing for a reason: dress down the pretensions of Alcantara and Sons with its plan of planting cassava in the watersheds area of Bayanga, this city. The company retreated, not necessarily due to my criticisms but due to the idea that sparked the conflagration of opposition against the bio-diesel plant.
So here I am again. The Spark of Law is back. Let there be a spark of law and reason in the dark days of fakery and fallacies.