Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY. By Ralph Jemmott
On Down to Brass Tacks of June 11, moderator David Ellis posed the question on where our country Barbados was headed? It is an appropriate question given the many uncertainties that the country faces. We are living in an uncertain world in which many of the old certitudes have disappeared.
Even the very fundamentals of our erstwhile beliefs are coming under threat. What after all is truth? What is real news and what is fake. Should we trust the official news channels or social media? What is of good report and what is not? What fundamentally is good anyway? Are not all values relative and variable? Is gender fluid rather than fixed? It is now difficult to tell the difference between morally informed knowledge and blatant nonsense. The rapid pace and volume of technological change is beginning to overwhelm a generation which struggles to keep up and often feels disoriented, alienated and tired.
One perceives the same in a younger generation struggling to make its way in a difficult age where there are few guard-rails, where employment is precarious and the future seems tenuous and pointless. Genuine dependable friendships are rare. It is hard to tell the sacred from the profane. Religion and spirituality seem hardly distinguishable from entertainment. In the space of under two weeks four young people have apparently taken their own lives.
These things speak to a deepening pathology in our psycho-social make-up. The political class hardly seems competent to check it and the leadership seems preoccupied with other issues like climate change and external borrowings. I was on the phone talking to a former teaching colleague when she heard a knock on her door. It was about 7:30 p.m. and she admitted to being worried and in her words ‘becoming a bit paranoid’ concerning her personal safety.
The events of the last three weeks speak to genuine concerns about where our country is headed.
In the early morning a man walking along the Hastings Main Road on the south coast tourist belt is robbed and shot by a number of men.
A mother waiting in her car outside the netball court at Waterford is attacked by three or four men dressed in black, apparently roughed up, and robbed of her car which has still not been recovered.
More alarming was an incident in Gall Hill, Christ Church, where a 68-year-old man was attacked and shot in his home while having dinner in his living room. His Barbados-born friend who was vacationing from England stated: ‘I’m on vacation and I’m leaving tonight. I born here and it makes me feel like I don’t want to come back. Yuh can’t have yuh front door open.’ She lamented.
Arguably the most alarming incident involved a shooting in the Farm Road area of St. Philip where a red Suzuki Swift was riddled with bullets. Police were looking for two men who were apparently inhabitants of the vehicle and believed to be wounded. The tragedy worsened when a severed finger was found nearby in a pool of blood. There appears to be something peculiarly sinister about the incident.
At the recent Crop Over Powda fete at Vaucluse St. Thomas, in a display of unbridled hooliganism, a group of non-paying young people stormed the event. It ended in missiles being thrown at stage performers. What else does one expect from a performance culture that calls us to “wuk up and get on bad” or to “mash up de place”. De fellas mash up de place…. wuh wunna complaining bout? Man hush.
On another level, the Principal of Westbury Primary Rosalind Gittens speaking at the school’s graduation ceremony warned of vandals plaguing the school. She stated: “We are being constantly faced with vandalism. Our school fence was removed off the pasture so now we have to keep the little ones inside. They also jump the school gate, come in and vandalise the plant-pots. They write obscene things on the school walls and urinate along the corridors and when we had a garden, they would thief some of the produce.”
She lamented that over the course of three separate incidents beginning in 2019, thieves had made off with golden palms, a hedge, red onions and cabbage. She concluded: ‘It is really distressing how we are trying to build the school and people in the community are pulling it down.”
I once attended a seminar where an 11-plus abolisher argued that children should attend the school in the neighbourhood. He contended that these resulting “community schools” would improve both the community and school. Principal Rosalind Gittens’ testimony gives the lie to that notion.
A writer to David Ellis on Brass Tacks on Thursday July 6, commented: “I never thought I would ever see Barbados come to this.” There is a palpable feeling that our country is changing and not for the better. If Barbados has in fact reached the sad state that the evidence suggests, it could not have done so without the complicity of the political class on both sides of the great divide. Barbados needs more defined parameters of governance, this Western-style laissez-faire paradigm will not suffice in a post-colonial polity struggling to order itself. Is this the face of the New Republic?
Truth be told, since 1966 both parties which have governed this country have had a myopic attitude to governance, one that has largely focused on the performance of the economy and ignored the workings of the society and the value system that underpins it. In this regard, the BLP has been particularly at fault, particularly under the administration of Owen Arthur where CARICOM and global trade issues inordinately dominated the discourse. Now it appears that apart from the talk, grave issues of related societal governance hardly seem to matter and it is those issues that now dominate the Barbadian consciousness. Where they ask, are we headed?
I had a conversation with someone who ventured the notion that Barbados needed a strong return to law and order, but that that was unlikely to happen under the present BLP administration. He was reluctant to expand on his observation, to which I asked, ‘too liberal?’ He replied that too, but much more. What did Owen Arthur mean when he suggested that his Barbados Labour Party had “lost its soul?” ]]>
