Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness reports to Parliament last Tuesday on the Government’s response to the damage inflicted by Hurricane Melissa. (Photo: Naphtali Junior)

It is said that the Chinese word for crisis is the same for opportunity. We have a crisis on our hands occasioned by the passage of Hurricane Melissa. Those who try to communicate otherwise are very foolish. This crisis has created many opportunities.

The first prudent step in dealing with and overcoming a crisis is to accept that one exists. The Andrew Holness-led Administration would do well to walk wide of a default-like position which many administrations globally have adopted during crises.

Denials are often damaging and deadly. Invariably, denials end in ruinous political consequences, quickly, certainly so, in participatory democracies. In the late 1970s, for example, economic and social dislocations were plenty in the United Kingdom. The period became known as The Winter of Discontent. Prime Minister James Callaghan, on his return from a short vacation in Barbados, was asked at the airport to say what he intended to do about the crisis. “Crisis? What crisis?” he said. That was the front-page headline in The Sun UK Edition the next day. Callaghan did not say those exact words, but his actual response was very unempathetic to country-wide suffering at the time.

Here at home rural folks contend that out of the deep recesses of the mind the mouth speaketh. Callaghan’s airport gaffe and his real and/or perceived unawareness regarding the debilitating hardships faced by especially ordinary Brits sealed the nail in his and the British Labour Party’s (BLP) political coffin.

The BLP is a socialist party and a fraternal twin of the People’s National Party (PNP) here in Jamaica.

Otto Von Bismarck, who is most famous for his role in German unif