Life lessons

They say that when your age 'drops off the calendar' you're no longer young. Well, today is the first day of my last year of youth. Perhaps I can mimic the calendar and begin again at one, next year. But then I'd have to relive some of the more difficult moments of life - potty training, homework, lost love, and that United States equaliser against the Reggae Boyz in World Cup 2006 qualifying. On second thought, I'll just sit back and reminisce about the good old days.

Just last week, when I was still a dapper, young 30-year-old, I solicited writing topics from within my social network. One particularly astute friend bemoaned the fact that I constantly 'lick out' against politicians, suggesting I should instead address the complacency of a citizenry that allows these politicians' nonsense to continue unabated. My response: Physics makes me do it. Just ask Sir Isaac Newton.

I must have been about 10 when I first learned Newton's third law of motion - for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When so-called leaders are running the nation's affairs in ways that forcefully unveil their gross disrespect for the Jamaican people, the Jamaican people, of which I count myself one, will, by nature, react with a force of equal and opposite intensity. My column, like the wholesale disdain for leadership displayed by the Jamaican populace in general, simply reflects the laws of physics.

In all honesty, I know virtually nothing about physics, so forgive me if my explanations are technically flawed. Perhaps it has something to do with my inattentiveness in class as a 16-year-old, prompting my young physics teacher's dire warning that, because of my innocuous joking around in his class, I might amount to nothing in life. He probably wasn't familiar with our friend Newton's first law of motion - an object in motion tends to remain in motion.

I was born in motion. Not that I had much to do with it. My grandparents, despite their own lack of higher education, were wise enough to instil certain values in their children - not the least of which was education. By the time I came along, I found a decent, two-parent, middle-class family grounded in those values. Amid the usual ups and downs, failures and disappointments of young adult life, and despite my best efforts to, at times, disregard my inherent values, I've invariably found myself being pulled, by some inexplicable force, back to them.

Waiting for Change

Many of our leaders - despite their behaviour - were privy to these same values. They know better. Yet, instead of leading the country down a path of prosperity, they choose to spend their time and our money bickering and babbling like petulant schoolchildren. Somewhere along the journey, they stopped the momentum of a proud and determined nation, contributed to the erosion of our values, and brought us to a grinding halt. The other part of Newton's first law states that an object at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. I 'lick out' against these leaders in hope of being - along with countless other Jamaicans who know and seek better - part of that unbalanced force of change.

I was about 15 when I first thought I saw that change coming. My cousin told me about a new political party he joined that, at its core, embraced the constitutional reforms necessary to revitalise Jamaica. I waited throughout the years as thousands of Jamaicans died violently. At 19, I counted a cousin among that fallen multitude. At 22, I learned that the forces of political tribalism were too strong to be overcome simply by this party's good ideas. So I hoped that the reformist agenda, incorporated into the two-party system, might still serve as a catalyst for restoration. By 27, it seemed close. I waited. Nothing happened, until last year, as a 30-year-old, when I witnessed the near implosion of our nation and the deaths of dozens of our fellow Jamaicans. And there, amid the rubble of a national catastrophe, having complacently waited half my life for meaningful change, I learned a tremendously valuable lesson - "put not your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save".

Din Duggan is an attorney who now works as a consultant with a global legal search firm. Email him at columns@gleanerjm.com or dinduggan@gmail.com or follow him at facebook.com/dinduggan and twitter.com/YoungDuggan.