Ronald Thwaites | Desperation and decadence

The spirit of pride in our independence and maturity should lead us all to try to identify areas for constructive change in our personal behaviour patterns and in the social life of the Jamaican nation. But are we even trying?

Last week, two of the best-known and, by some, most highly regarded companies, Supreme Ventures and Carreras, announced a partnership to more effectively sell each other’s products. Big money is involved. Watch out for more. The ganja and liquor merchants soon join them.

Gambling and smoking rival each other to constitute the most dangerous addictions to which the poorest of Jamaicans can be seduced easily and cheaply. Neither produce any good or service of value to the users. Instead, both compromise mental and physical health, bleed the nation of real output and livity, and cost billions in compulsive poverty, horrible pain, expensive healthcare and death. Yes, it is that bad.

And government is hopelessly complicit. Billions of taxes are collected from both industries. Finance ministers will say the Budget can’t do without the money. That position indicts the State as a partner in promoting ‘downpression’ and death. That’s what we have come to.

More than half of all smokers will suffer debilitating health, and for every somebody who stumbles upon the lucky numbers, thousands more will have to lose what they wagered. The banker and the taxcollector win every time.

Remember John Maxwell’s dying advice about how smoking had mashed up his life. Men will experience quailing penises; spouses and children suffer want when the house money is gambled and lost.

BIG DIVIDENDS

I understand that the ‘gaming’ and tobacco companies pay big dividends. Of course. There is always plenty money to be made when you prey upon the addictive urges of desperate people. Check the demographics of the lines at the betting shops and at the cigarette counters on the street corners, bars or gas stations.

Quite legally, of course, and with the consent of the desperate, feckless and depraved, these products and those who profit from them demean the quality of lives and distract from real productivity and happiness.

Please don’t bother prating about the numbers of vendors involved or how sports and some other social welfare programmes are kept afloat by gambling and cigarette money. Those ends don’t justify those means. Financing the healthy lifestyles of athletes by encouraging us all to take mental and physical poison is crooked and illogical reasoning.

“You can’t win your troubles away” is even more true now than it was when Michael Manley said it.

The churches used to be foremost in encouraging people towards healthy lifestyles. Especially the Protestants, since the Catholics have for long held on to an unacceptably casuistic position regarding both vices. More recently, the religious witness towards the holiness of labour and effort over chance and caprice: the sanctity of the body instead of its casual destruction by unhealthy habits, has become as weak as Jesus’ broken body – except, commendably, for the Adventists.

Check out how long it has taken us to pass a law to bring us into compliance with the anti-smoking convention we signed years ago. No accident. This, despite the largely unappreciated efforts of people like Dr Fenton Ferguson, Nurse Debbie Chen, Sir George Alleyne and the late Drs Eva Fuller and Knox Hagley.

Freedom of choice to smoke and gamble does not entitle my exercise of these habits to prejudice the welfare of others and the imposition of my heavy burdens on the community. But that is exactly what will now happen.

The least Supreme Ventures and Carreras must be enjoined to do is to pay for comprehensive mental and physical health-recovery programmes to try to rescue us from the very perils into which they, same ones, have seduced us. They should be made to pay.

Tell me if you think the Government has the principle to make this happen. Remember the tax and the political contributions.

LOOKING NORTH NO MORE

I have to agree with Erica Virtue, who advises that the next time the US offers to send us election monitors or lectures us on democracy, we should decline politely and suggest that they need to first attend to the repair of the laws and institutions of freedom in their own land.

The liberal, Christian-based ideals of social contract and the common good in the USA (and much of Europe, too) are in great danger. Half of America has abandoned them for nativism and jingoism.

They use religious fundamentalism, much like the Taliban use sharia, to espouse gun culture, renascent racism, xenophobia, suppression of voting rights, and increasing economic and social elitism, similar to what the Jamaican House of Assembly did in 1865.

At the other extreme, the pseudo-liberal left, in their binge of self-obsession, have discarded basal humanism and the Judeo-Christian ethic; equally forgotten the concept of the common good and defend intolerant distortions of human rights. They would dash away the sanctity of life itself by killing the heartbeat and dismembering the body of the unborn child. They eschew commitment, faithfulness and restraint on the altar of personal convenience and advancement. They are equally the evangelists of inequality.

More of us should read Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract to understand the inbred biases of our system. The author, a Jamaican political philosopher, little appreciated among us, died recently.

Despite all of our largely self-imposed problems, thank God for Jamaica, land we love!

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.