It may be January 12, but there's no harm in making or renewing a wish for this bold new year we are embarking upon -not an empty wish such as 'I wish I'd been born on Mars,' which is a hopeless wish.

The act of wishing may appear flaky, but it is an expression of hope, and it should not be an idle one. Wishing can propel us forward.

Hope is an essential element of human existence. It actually acknowledges a roadblock and the need to overcome it. Moving from hoping to seeing how we can realise the vision of surmounting difficulty is what we need to focus on. Not letting life live you but you living it, as the mantra goes; not bowing to what might seem our destiny but believing we can shape our world and not relying on others to do so for us, as President Obama might have recommended.

Now, more than ever, we need hope, because it could help us contain the growing fear arising from the many and varied uncertainties around us, uncontrollable developments which are threatening in word and nature.

Starting at home, the Prime Minister, announced his resignation in advance of the 2025 general election and last week used an unorthodox manner of arriving at his successor as PM.

Members of the PNM itself, those outside the PM's inner circle, have been openly critical of Dr Rowley's method of having serving parliamentarians vote for that person. It has shaken people's trust. since, although the rules of the party have not been broken, this way of doing things is unprecedented.

The fact that the vote between the two candidates who put themselves forward was almost an equal split introduces a possible element of friction.

However, the ruling party is mature and well organised and will know how to overcome that, plus the process is not yet complete as the new leader of the party is still to be determined.

But this is happening against the backdrop of a limited state of emergency and the fear that the country cannot withstand the high levels of crime and is not being well governed. Will the next PM, from whichever party wins the election, have the will and ability to deal with crime when people no longer trust politicians and consider them part of the problem?

It is clear that world leaders, from China and Canada, to Russia and all of Europe, are easing conventions, if not exactly breaking the rules, to achieve what might be personal or narrow, even contentious aims. And who can blame them when politics is the art of the possible and we are now in the age of pragmatism? The idealism of the post war period is slowly dying.

Change does not happen in a vacuum, and the person setting the course for political unorthodoxy is President-elect Trump, who will soon take office in Washington. He has contested elections, committed crimes, caused an insurrection, constantly lies, is narcissistic, denies global warming, and yet he prevails. It tells us something about where we are in the development of human society and people's disillusionment with the status quo.

Naipaul's 'mimic men' might apply to many politician