#BTColumn – Imperilled youth

On Wednesday July 7, a caller to Brass Tacks raised the issue of what he saw happening to some children in Barbados.

His concern was with children aged seven to ten from a working class area, which he named, who were exhibiting very worrisome behaviours.

Moderator Corey Lane who himself has an interest in the cause of youth was equally concerned with the

issues raised.

The caller drew attention to very young children, mostly boys, who were already displaying troubling signs of

serious deviant behaviour.

The juvenile miscreants were apparently running through the neighbourhood overturning garbage cans and beating up on smaller children. A second caller phoned to support the first and said that calls had been made to the police and other social agencies about the matter, but that, and you know the story, “nothing was done.”

The conversation raised the prospect that if the youthful deviant trends were not corrected, the possibility was that in a few years the same children could become involved in the kinds of more serious criminal activity that is becoming increasingly evident in Barbados.

However, the initial caller went further, questioning why persons were producing children whose life chances they clearly lacked the material or cultural wherewithal to sustain and enhance.

It was an issue that this writer had raised in an earlier article. Shortly after, a caller to Brass Tacks stated that young people should not be blamed for getting four or five children because, she noted, it took a village to raise a child. It was a curious response.

Firstly, assuming that a benevolent village still exists, it is unlikely that in today’s world, that entity could be charged with the responsibility for raising a child. Besides many people feel that they run a risk in attempting to intervene in the lives of others and that they can no longer change the world beyond their own doorsteps.

Village or no village, it would be the mother and the children who wake in the morning with little or nothing to eat. The mothers crying, the poor children bawling. Poverty is not an academic, theoretical abstraction. It would be the same mothers who would face the courts in support of their sons when they contravene the law.

Sadly, the fathers are hardly ever present. I recall a formlevel meeting with a mother whose son at Harrison College was experiencing academic difficulties. I ventured to ask about the child’s father, only to be told:

“His father is not in the picture.”

Absent fatherhood is a persistent feature of the black familial social pathology. As moderator Dennis

Johnson rightly stated on another Brass Tacks program, this has to stop.

We have seen too many cases of single mothers with no roof over their heads, begging for welfare to take care of four or five children. One of the critical aspects of today’s culture is a persistent tendency to diminish personal responsibility for one’s life choices.

A budding political aspirant who has been a member of every political party ever formed in Barbados once wrote that to be critical of the poor was in his words “to blame the victim.”

This is often done by ostensibly liberal politicians and petit-bourgeois academics who keep promising deliverance to the poor, in what Robert J. Samuelson once termed “the politics of self-pity.”

I could not help but smile when I heard a prominent politician say that a certain working class area, the same mention by the first caller, was taking on the appearance of “a slum,” her words, not mine. There was a brief period when that same area was viewed as offering prospects of a great socio-cultural renewal among the working class.

The plight of young working class males is one that has long concerned me. Unquestionably because like so many now ostensibly ‘middle class’ adults, I have my origins in that class.

Many decades ago after a shoot-out in Edghill, St. Thomas, I penned a piece entitled “Tales of young men drowning”.

It was a play on the title of a book I had read as a young adult. Later I wrote another article titled “Poor, Black and Duncy”, in which I lamented the lack of remedial, compensatory schooling for less academically inclined males from the lower socio-economic strata in Barbadian society.

Both fell largely on deaf ears.

The more fortunate who were poor, black but were not totally ‘duncy’ and who were blessed with aspiring parents, were afforded upward mobility. We were able to acquire fairly good jobs and proceeded to purchase ‘a splendid isolation’ for ourselves.

The 2009 Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture was entitled, The Third Industrial Revolution and a New Social Vision for the 21st Century. The speaker, Mr. Jeremy Rifkin observed: “The key for every nation is to lay out a compelling social vision to accompany the new economic vision.” The operative word in the Rifkin quote is “compelling”. Compelling in the sense that law and order was a compelling imperative in Mr. Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore.

It is one of the tragedies of post-independence Barbados, that we never laid out any compelling social vision beyond the economic imperatives of collectively and individually earning a living. Critics of this article might contend that Barbados has consistently spent much on education and social welfare.

This would be true, but this not the kind of ‘compelling vision’ I think Rifkin was talking about. Besides, firstly, in the period after 1966, formal schooling has become more concerned with credentialism, social mobility and status climbing.

To paraphrase the noted historian Donald Wood writing about the post Emancipation period, “a people has been freed, but a society has not been formed.”

Admittedly it is not easy to form a society, incomparably more problematic than running an economy. In fact, Margaret Thatcher once famously questioned whether in reality, there was even such a thing as a ‘Society.’ This is particularly true where we are talking about a society emerging out of plantation slavery and colonial dominance.

Besides, secondly in a fragile economy, the socio-economic underclass, what the Manchester school of sociologists called ‘the sunken working class’ can reproduce itself faster than the Government can redeem its impoverishment.

In the 1976 Memorial Lecture Dr. Ernst Schumacher speaking on the topic, Independence and Economic Development, stated: “Wisdom demands a new orientation of Science and Technology towards the organic, the gentle, the elegant and the beautiful.”

I remember that on that occasion, the Frank Collymore Hall was full, but apparently no one comprehended a single word he said, or if they did, they never acted on it.