Ronald Thwaites | Of intimate things

It was last Wednesday morning, the day of her PEP language arts exam. In uniform, hand shyly over her mouth, she approached the man she has been told is her father at the bus stop just below Liguanea. “Mama seh mi fi ask you for lunch money an’ to buy somet’ing.” “Why she sen you to me? Don’t she workin’ money? Don’t you get lunch at school? What something you want to buy?” The reply spoken to the ground: “A pack of pads.” “So you turn big woman now! Tell yu madda, a she to give you dem t’ings. Mi no have no money now.”

This incident was related by the big woman from the nearby school who led the shamed girl away and, I know, helped her. I wonder how she performed in the exams though. And I wonder how she will perform in life.

“Which father whose child asks him for bread will give him a stone?” (Matt 7 v 9)

CRUCIAL FAMILY TIES

Dr. Herbert Gayle tells us that more fathers are stepping up to their responsibilities. That is good. But many still do not. Nor do mothers always. Some women contribute to poor parenting by their own desperation, carelessness and unreasonable demands.

Either way their children suffer. None of the children in one typical class at my school have married parents and only a few are from two-parent households. Most have phones with unlimited social media access though. Force-ripeness is now a big national problem.

Lord Anthony Sewell of Jamaican parentage, recently made a member of the British House of Lords for his years of work with black youths, credits his success and that of his equally renowned US counterpart from a similar background, Ian Rowe, to their working-class mothers and fathers striving together. They both benefited from early church connections and voracious reading habits which combined to forge “a passion to make their own way and not allow any negativity to thwart their goals”.

FREE

In his soon to be released book, Black Success, The Surprising Truth, Tony Sewell lists the pillars of his framework for living by Ian’s acronym, FREE – Family, Religion, Education and Enterprise.

The intensive promotion of faithful parenting, moral standards, effective learning and principles and practices of ethical business ought to become fundamental national campaigns in Jamaica. In this election year do you think we could at least agree on that? Then we could judge which political tendency was the more practical and sincere in advancing them.

FUTILITY

None of the worthy ideas and vaunted promises put forth by Mark Golding and Andrew Holness last week have any chance of fruition in a society of weak family relations, agnostic and hedonistic values, rampant illiteracy and pervasive corruption.

All the heady talk about STEAM and AI in schools is so much self-delusion when more than a half of school leavers cannot read, compute or behave at levels to access those exalted competencies. At best we are building up a permanent underclass. At worst we are squandering billions to feed inequality, disillusionment and crime.

‘IS WHAT?’

Jamaica’s culture of permissive promiscuity is not helping personal or national development. The big high school girl sat on the school steps in full view leaning on her gangster-trousered boyfriend with her hand down his crotch. “Is what? After we a no gay,” was the response when reprimanded.

Long ago, the late Edward Seaga amused us in Parliament when, promoting family planning, he advised men (and women) “to bat, but don’t score”. It is the equivalent of wounding your child and being disloyal to one’s society for two people to procreate a vulnerable human being with no commitment to jointly provide, nurture and protect what God has created through them. It is that serious.

WHAT PIVOT?

So the pivoting that we are talking about, the acceleration of economic growth and the transformation of education has to be accompanied by a profound change of social and interpersonal relations at the most intimate levels. Every child, like the little girl just turning woman, must be able to relate to her father in a more positive and loving way. Teenagers must be taught that modesty and self-restraint are beautiful virtues which enhance rather than prevent the joy of sexual expression.

Are there public standards that promote these things and relate them to personal development and national growth? We don’t have any welfare state which provides bigger living quarters or more cash transfers the more children you have. Amid all the systemic injustice of our past and present, we Jamaicans have to acknowledge the attitudinal changes without which we deepen distress by being architects of our own misfortune.

ABOUT HOUSING

Because the National Housing Trust (NHT) has become so generous a feeding trough for government, its easily replenished wealth was the centrepiece of both leaders’ budget presentations last week. Affordable housing is an important prerequisite of family stability. Not the castle of pretentious empty rooms, but the modest sacred tabernacle of family security.

Our national security requires probably 200,000 such houses now. Some are already half-built or in need of restoration. In the inner cities and squatter settlements, NHT intergenerational soft loans combined with prodigious owner ingenuity and frugality can upgrade tens of thousands of units for much less than $14 million each. It can happen in record time too. It would be a redemptive process for social order such as independent Jamaica has yet to experience. Why not light that “spark” to fuel a blaze of hope, engagement, contentment and social order with available NHT and private capital right now?

We can do so much more for ourselves with what we have if we stopped fighting each other to be twisted rulers in a beautiful, but scorched land.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com