The kids don't stand a chance

by Din Duggan

A debate supposedly focusing on youth socioeconomic issues took place last Saturday night. It's only been four days, but I'm ashamed to admit that I feel a bit like Senator Dwight Nelson - I can't recall much from the performance.

Although, I do recall some guy flinging more zingers than a market woman and another gentleman feigning passion in a manner that would make Kim Kardashian proud. The other participants laboriously shuffled through prepared scripts. If not for Lisa Hanna, I would have turned off the TV and spent the remainder of my evening watching paint dry.

After the debate, TVJ featured a panel of bright youngsters critiquing the debaters. As with many things in Jamaica, both debate and analysis consisted chiefly of form over substance - supposedly brilliant young people making theoretically sensible points but focusing predominantly on technique and procedure over substance and practicality.

For all the prepared responses and debating skills - or lack thereof - demonstrated, the socio-economic problems facing our youth are not one step closer to being solved. Just ask St Jago High School students. They went to school last Thursday to learn, but instead found themselves in a war zone - forced to take cover on classroom floors as police and gangsters traded bullets outside the school's gates. I wonder how those students feel about their bright young leaders.

In Theory

Jamaicans are a theoretic people lost in a pragmatic world. While other nations build, create, produce and develop, we theorise. While our youth are murdered and raped and wander - jobless and aimless - around street corners, our leaders 'trace'. Our future leaders stand on stage fumbling through papers and trading insults as if prepared remarks and corny one-liners can solve the nation's problems.

Younger persons score debate performances as though it were a beauty pageant. And then others like me complete the cycle by opining on the whole mess, as if tapping away at an Apple keypad will magically create employment for the 400,000-plus jobless Jamaican youth.

After winning the Morris Cargill Award for Opinion Journalism last year, Gleaner columnist Martin Henry wrote: "I write therefore I am." Surely, writing can be, and often is, a useful undertaking - I certainly hope so. The dissemination of rational ideas, in written form, theoretically plays an instrumental role in informing public policy. But in this country, where most key decision-makers are guided primarily by self-aggrandisement, the writer's work is not unlike that notorious tree - fallen, unnoticed, deep in the brushy core of the forest.

In the midst of the battle, when the soul, the heart, and, in fact, the very existence of a nation is at stake, it is not those who sit comfortably in air-conditioned rooms preparing debate responses or writing columns that matter. It is, like Theodore Roosevelt said, the man risking everything in the arena - bloodied and sweaty - who counts. In some other country, at some other time in history, Martin Henry might be correct. But in Jamaica, today, "I write (or talk or debate), therefore I am not" seems a more apt axiom.

Time to Act

The socioeconomic crisis enveloping our youth will not be solved by zesty one-liners, polysyllabic words or engaging columns. If we continue to sit patiently, taking cues from the previous generation, awaiting the dregs of their failed policies to trickle down to us, our nation will continue to languish in mediocrity. The legacy that has been left to us is one of flawed governance, inefficient and uninventive businesses, intellectual slothfulness from our institutions of higher learning, violence, materialism, injustice, inequity, greed and dishonesty.

As we enter the next half-century of independence, we would be unwise to continue on the current path - waiting for a better Jamaica to be delivered to us from the same charlatans who wrecked it. Our liberation would never arrive. The only logical course at this critical juncture in our history, in this broken nation of ours, is to build and innovate, diligently; immediately - creating efficient enterprises, social organisations and political movements that will forge for us a vibrant and prosperous future.

At 19, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were idling in Jobs' parents' basement creating the backbone of what is today the most valuable company on earth. By 33, Nelson Mandela was leading the African National Congress' Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws. At 36, Bob Marley was dead. The time to act - rather than talk or write or tweet - is now. If not, our generation won't stand a chance; Jamaica won't stand a chance.

Din Duggan is an attorney working as a consultant with a global legal search firm. Email him at columns@gleanerjm.com or dinduggan@gmail.com, or view his past columns at facebook.com/dinduggan and twitter.com/YoungDuggan.