Ronald Thwaites | Is there balm in Gilead?

Help me with this confusion. Jamaica is becoming the poster child of the International Monetary Fund? So much so that they are lending us nearly US$2 billion on the best terms imaginable. This is good. Excellent credit is a nation’s asset.

STEPPIN’

But, then come with me at the United States Embassy any weekday where the numbers of prospective migrants, mostly young and educated, have tripled. Pay attention also to the increasing number of our people heading by any means to the Rio Grande border. All voting with their feet, running away from the let-down of what was promised,“Prassperty”.

Which assessment of the nation’s health is accurate? I think both are. The money-changers and large producers see profits soaring. This political economy is for them. For the fixed income person, the pensioner, the hundreds of thousands of working-age people outside the labour market, the demonstrating STETHS teachers, the majority of the employed subsisting at or just slightly above the ridiculous minimum wage; they are searching for a way out. Jamaica continues to be one of the countries with the highest levels of income inequalit, a nation of Dives and Lazarus.

Things can’t stay as they are. Government and the ruling class opt for slow incremental progress and trickle down economics. They want us to hang on to their delusion that the present path can deliver “five in four”, sustained progress for everybody.

Talk the truth. Which MP or councillor can realistically assure his or her constituents that their poverty will be significantly relieved during their lifetimes?

BASIC NEEDS

The majority living on the margins yearn for another order, for transformation, in food availability, really good education, nuff, not token, housing starts, affordable health care and efficient public transportation, just the basic things needed for a good life.

Last week the Food and Agricultural Organization told us that it costs more than $600 per day to buy healthy food in our region of the world. It’s probably higher in Jamaica given our weak agriculture output and cultivated foreign tastes. Multiply that sum for seven days and assume that the average wage-earner feeds three or four dependents then figure that a living wage for food alone ought to be around $15,000 a week.

What else could be more important to talk about in the upcoming Budget debate? How else do we avert the growing, expensive, life-sapping scourge of noncommunicable diseases?

“When his child asks for bread, which father will give him a stone?” (Matt 7,10)

The well-fed among us feel that the existing order of things is sorta OK, or inevitable or maybe even the way God ordained it to be. There are some religious people who idealise other people’s poverty instead of trying to eliminate it. Structural change towards equality of opportunity, towards something as fundamental as healthy food for all, is too disruptive of their social, economic and theological order to be considered. We live as if there will be no Judgment Day and that Jesus’ words in Matthew 25 are a lie.

THE BAPTISTS

The members of the Baptist Church are not among that group. At their annual convention last Sunday, all Baptists were exhorted to return to their tradition of revolutionary witness in the face of weakened spiritual principles and advancing secularism in this society, in short, the advance of Babylon.

Using the text of Jesus’ reaction to the debasement of the temple by merchants, the president of the Jamaica Baptist Union, Reverend Glenroy Lalor, spoke of the increasing commodification of human life and the idolatry of “things” over the flourishing of people in Jamaica.

His address was a powerful reminder that, among all other religious groups in our history, Baptists have been in the forefront of struggle against the sins of slavery, the denial of access to land and the systemic racism of plantation and post-plantation society. They have a tradition of calling this society to righteousness, the synonym for justice.

“Apathy is the good friend of indifference,” was his riposte to those of us who watch our fundamental rights being threatened, family life undermined, inequality, cruelty and disorder normalised and treat it all as “a no nuttin”.

Cold war

The Baptist “family” have a unique pedigree to revive faith-based social activism in Jamaica. And were other denominations to rope in, to refuse to allow the European religious and imperialistic squabbles of the 16th century to continue ambushing us by putting churches at cold war with each other, why then, a salvific, united witness, based on gospel standards, will emerge. The Third World can’t afford to import a Reformation of division as part of our colonial crucifixion.

Sir Patrick Allen and the leaders of the two major political parties were attentive during the Reverend Lalor’s charge for unity and revival . As thousands watched them, I wondered why Sir Patrick Allen does not use his office to conspicuously promote political consensus. Doesn’t he get it that neither political party nor individual church group can, by themselves, overcome the apathy and indifference of a majority of Jamaicans; the waning of zeal for the “new kingdom” of which Reverend Lalor spoke?

I have respect for Andrew Holness and I have confidence in Mark Golding. Reverend Lalor remarked that they appeared happy sitting beside each other at the service. They were. And why not? But are they free enough to understand that many more of us would follow their lead ardently; fewer of us would forsake Jamaica or withdraw from public participation, if both of them spoke and acted together about the common good and public policy? What if they convinced us by word and deed that united national direction is more integral than amassing personal fortunes and servicing the dictates and whims of the modern equivalents of the Roman Empire?

The spiritual revival, to which the Baptists have recommitted themselves, ought to be the precursor of a political revival of order and humaneness, which no fiddling with the constitution can achieve.

There is balm in this Gilead.

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