Ronald Thwaites | Finding common purpose

I think it was Viktor Frankel who said that when a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning in life, he/she distracts themselves in pleasure. It’s true of a nation as well. Crooked and superficial thinking takes over.

Just check out the news last night (Friday). The Prime Minister is cussing the critics and pronouncing economic recovery while, same time, the Bank of Jamaica (in usual convoluted jargon bested only by the Planning Institute!)is pointing to serious problems ahead. Who to trust? The BOJ’s six per cent interest rate is drawing more blood from all who need credit to do a little business. The unbridled loan sharks are charging higher interest (and fees) than they did in Bustamante’s time.

The official inflation measurement is a different one from what applies at Coronation Market. People can’t buy food – chicken and gas price reductions are a serious joke. Persons who probably have an interest in the lands they live on are being evicted, and gambling is becoming the major opportunity for earning by thousands who are considered employed.

I should know. Many of us Jamaican politicians have lost control of effective political action. We can spin a narrative which hardly anyone believes – nuff cheap houses coming, teachers no problem, crime getting under control, and’ five-in-four’ soon come back...and more.

Yeah man. We are for consensus, but I can’t come to the next partnership meeting; or why don’t they just agree with what we are saying, anyway?

EFFECTIVE POLITICS

Common purpose is key to effective politics. We can hold on to devalued titles and expensive perks; some can control the money and siphon some (plenty) to friends and ‘combolos’, but carry little respect and have largely lost the capacity to redeem the people who we represent.

Next big argument on the news is about the effect of dancehall lyrics on criminal disposition. I don’t think dancehall induces anyone to carry a gun. But what it does encourage is a slackness of behaviour; implies freedom to mean doing what you please, a deep-down self-obsession – the opposite of a shared common purpose – the cultivation of which must be the ultimate purpose of culture and its political (and religious) expression.

Back to the nightly news: the youth crippled by stray gunshot is improving. His mother, a picture of heroism, is pleading for more support than the billion dollars the bank has given. No mention of his father.

If we continue to trivialise sexual relations, the consequence is less commitment, less faithfulness; sensuality divorced from love. Children suffer. Family, after all, is where common purpose is formed and nurtured. The perversion of that in slave society back then, and in hedonistic culture now, is the real malady of dancehall.

Twenty-five per cent of Jamaicans are soft or supportive of scamming. Why? Where did they learn this? How will it affect the nation’s future when a significant number of young people, quoting Herbert Gayle, “carry a belly for the USA” and feel it’s OK to “tek sumting offa dem”? What’s the common effort to curb this? A police problem, you say, in post-Grand Gala delusion?

EDUCATE TOWARDS COMMON PURPOSE

Jamaica is in denial about the depth of the crisis in education. It’s not Minister Williams’ fault. But she must be a leader in digging us out of the systemic problems, as none of us who have sat in her chair recently have been able to do. Here are some suggestions.

Buy out the long leave of as many teachers as are willing. Call out the retired teachers who will come. Allow good school personnel to stay on beyond retirement age for as long as they are effective. Open wider the support, financial and otherwise, for aspiring teachers to make up matriculation requirements and begin training. There should not be one vacant place in a teachers’ college next month! Everyone benefiting should be appropriately bonded.

Promote but manage the prospect of teaching overseas. Calibrate the demand with the satisfaction of local needs. People who get professional training at taxpayers’ expense have an obligation to those who paid for them. That is not slavery. That is responsibility.

Offer capable university students a rebate of their tuition if they take a leave of absence, a gap year, to teach. Mobilise master teachers in every subject and every grade and beam their offerings on every media platform to classrooms without teachers, or where instruction is weak.

Alumni, parents, business, continue the philanthropy to schools, but more this time: offer time and presence, like what the late Lanny Reynolds did for Kingston Technical or Douglas Orane for Wolmer’s.

No mere gestures or gimmicky. Real thing. Figure what a lift it would be for Andrew and Juliet to teach a class at St Catherine High, even once a month, and Sandra and Mark at Campion College. Or anywhere else in their constituencies. Talk to the students about public service, about family life, about career choices. Listen to their stories and to the teachers, too. The mood would change. Common purpose would be fostered.

It is now a year since the transformation report by the Orlando Patterson Commission has been available to the Government. Jamaica’s lopsided and criminally unequal economy and society will never grow more than a ‘peaw-peaw’ one or two per cent per annum until we fix education.

It is egregious that another school year should be about to start without common purpose about issues like the unaffordable and unnecessary book lists, the unclear and inadequate school feeding programme, the policy on truancy, and the reform of school finances.

There is still enough time to ground our hope in strategic and affordable efforts to forge common purpose in this crucial arena.

“Woe to those who enact unjust statutes and write oppressive decrees, depriving the needy of judgment and robbing my people’s poor of their rights…What will you do on the day of punishment when ruin comes from afar? To whom will you flee for help, where will you leave your wealth?”(Isaiah 10, 1-4).

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