I started to write this column for The South Florida Times after retiring from the newspaper where I served as editor for four years. I was encouraged to do so by the publisher, Robert Beatty, and his wife, Michele Green Beatty, the vice president for advertising.

I hesitated for quite some time because I did not think that I had anything to say about any topic that others were not already addressing and partly because I regarded my career in journalism as having ended. But I finally gave in, choosing my own topics and not being held to deadlines. I would write when I felt strong enough about some issue.

My first column appeared probably in 2017, but I soon realized that I had been right: there were enough opinion writers around and I was only adding to the clutter. I had to find a niche, and I settled on providing background to issues, as I did when I gave a five minute weekly commentary titled “In Perspective” on Radio Demerara in my native Guyana. Eventually, the columns, which started at about 750 words, grew to around 1,350.

To expand my knowledge base so I could write on a wide range of topics, I read more than 40 non-fiction books chosen mostly after I was impressed by their reviews, in addition to several I had previously read just to stay informed. They varied from “Strongmen” by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, about autocrats; “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer, about the corrupting influence of money on politics; “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg, about class; “A History of God” by Karen Armstrong; “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari, about evolution; and “Coolie Woman” by fellow Guyanese Gaiutra Bahadur, about the hardships that indentured women from India had to endure.

I took out online subscriptions to publications such as The Miami Herald, The Sun-Sentinel, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and subscribed to magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Vanity Fair and Mother Jones. I read stories from sites such as The Associated Press, CNN, HuffPost and ProPublica. When a story caught my attention, I downloaded it to one of more than 100 folders on my computer. To ensure that the columns were current, I followed the news daily. I checked facts with Wikipedia and Google.

I kept notepads and pens everywhere: on the sofa looking at television, at my computer desk, at my bedside. I jotted notes from other sources, such television shows when some actor’s remarks caught my attention.

As I got deeper into the subjects, several columns required a lot more work and time than I had anticipated. For instance, for a piece about COVID19 vaccination protests that ended up at 875 words, I read or at least perused 50 articles, totaling about 40,000 words. The column went through seven drafts and took several days to complete – all of this to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife and our three daughters: “Don’t you know you retired?”

I do not know whether the columns have been useful purpose or were merely filling space in the newspaper. But writing them has been a labor of love and the high point of the career of a country boy turned minor journalist that also included nearly 15 years as editor of The Miami Times and nine as a Miami Herald Neighbors editor. But it was not all an American experience. I brought with me 16 years of journalism.

At age 19, I worked as a schoolteacher. The career switch eight years later was wholly unplanned. I loved short story writing and won four prizes in a competition sponsored by a Sun- day newspaper, whose editor, the late Charles Chichester, hired me as a features writer; I eventually moved up to chief reporter. I was also the Guyana correspondent for a few overseas news organizations.

I traveled overseas on short reporting assignments, including to Algeria, Britain, the Caribbean, Canada, Egypt, India, Libera, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Suriname. I worked for a year in the Cayman Islands and 18 months in the Turks and Caicos Islands. My major assignments were covering a few NonAligned Movement and Caribbean Heads of State conferences, and especially the Jim Jones/Peoples Temple tragedy in 1978 in Guyana.

So, when I immigrated in 1984 – with citizenship five years later – I had no experience working on any American newspaper but still The Miami Times gave me a break. By the time I finally retired, I had worked in journalism from 1968 for roughly half a century. And if there has been a rainbow at the end of my career, it is being able to write these columns.

This one is a farewell, of sorts, but there are still issues that weigh on my mind. For one, there is urgent need to restore civility in public discourse, for my fellow Americans to show empathy for others, instead of demonizing them.

There is need to look closely at the “womanosphere,” a counterpart to the “manosphere.” As Adrienne Matei noted in The Guardian, in true fascist style going back to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, it derides feminism. It insists that women must be totally subservient to men, staying home and making babies, a role in which, Matei wrote, “womanhood is informed by anti-queerness, white supremacy, fundamentalist Christianity and traditional maternalism.”

The obscene wealth disparity must be more closely examined, along with the impression which some of the super-rich convey that achieving the American Dream means being able to live an outrageously ostentatious life and spend money to dictate the course of the nation.

The impact of social media needs further exploration, as well. Instead of being in control of technology, it is controlling us. We are allowing ourselves to be led to an alternate world in which human relationships are not important, where we become emotion- ally desensitized. Patricia Marx reported in The New Yorker that, according to the chatbot company Joi AI, citing a poll, “83 percent of Gen Z-ers believed that they could form a ‘deep emotional bond’ with a chatbot, 80 percent could imagine marrying one, and 75 percent felt that relationships with A.I. companions could fully replace human couplings.”

At the same time, more young Americans, instead of being hooked on TikTok, must pursue careers in STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – particularly artificial intelligence. The Guardian recently published an absorbing profile of Chang Che, who rose from a desperately impoverished childhood in China to become one of the world’s top AI scientists. It is the wave of the future.

And the nation must undergo a truth and reconciliation process, as happened in South Africa, to address the wrongs done to Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, whose descendants are American citizens still struggling to gain equality.

The now ubiquitous online sports “betting” competing for space on television and the gambling addicts which it is creating is still to be investigated. As Matt Zarb-Cousin pointed out in Jacobin magazine, “Since the inception of the internet and subsequently mobile gambling, everyone now has a casino in their pocket that tracks their behavior,” referring to the smartphone.

Finally, I urge full support for neighborhood newspapers such as The Miami Times, The South Florida Times and The Westside Gazette. Such publications have been in the forefront of the struggle for justice and the need for them has never ended.

And now, in my 84th year of life, I may finally get back to fiction, where it all began, and allow myself to get lost in the creativity of others. I may even start to look more at commercially produced movies and television shows, knowing full well that they may appear to be entertainment but that there is the inevitable propaganda somewhere. I expect to follow current affairs, but it will be with the understanding that it is because of my abiding curiosity, while aware that, to rework a line from Gen. Douglas McArthur, “Old journalists never die; they just fade away.”