Ronald Thwaites | Delusions we live by

“They turned the face of his picture to the wall at the family home on Duke Street a century ago, so ashamed were they that he took the side of ‘those people’ “. The late, revered Keble Munn pointed to the portrait of our relative George William Gordon, which now hung in a place of honour at his home.

Those with influence in 1865 were prepared to weep at the departure of the butcher Edward John Eyre, curse Gordon for betraying his colour, insist that Bogle had got what was coming to him, and even offer their limited powers of self-government to Queen Victoria as an oblation for her protection against the unwashed.

Our history is replete with similar instances of the society running away from the problems of social reality or responding mainly with repression and brutality.

Prejudice feeds on the denial of reality; the refusal to acknowledge systemic wrong instead of embracing the change of heart which humane values, truth and the common good require.

My grandmother’s sister was the prized beauty of the Westmoreland family at the turn of the 19th century. Her ‘disgrace’ was to fall in love with the overseer’s up-standing, brown-skinned son. Since marriage was declared impossible, the couple eloped and married anyway, living virtuously and raising a large family not more than twenty miles away in the hills of Trelawny.

But her birth family declared her dead and would pray their Jewish mourning prayers for her as if she rested in the nearby family plot.

So much has changed for the better since then. Yet, at the turn of 2021, I detect other delusions, no less self-imposed and toxic, which we continue to live by and disappoint our best prospects.

From a deeply racist society, we have become, still colour-tinted, a deeply classist society with inequalities of opportunity being accepted as inevitable and normative – even God-ordained.

The large urban cemetery needs cleaning and rehabilitation. Within minutes of arriving to scope the work, a dozen young men from one side of the community appeared, soon matched by a similar posse from another section.

“Nutten cyan gwan hereso unless is we control it.” That was the common theme. Some want work, others just want money. Some offer ‘protection’, others hurl threats, mostly at each other. How many have a gun? All assert entitlement and display victimhood.

REPRESSION AND STATE OF EMERGENCY

Those who control money power and security power insist that more repression and a renewal of the everlasting state of emergency in the very area of that cemetery will bring these men to heel and probably consign some to the vacant graves.

What delusion! They pretend not to see the hordes of children gathering behind their elders, out of class for a year, hungry for the missing school lunch; inevitably ready to take the place of as many of those who were cut down or chased away in St Thomas in 1865, from land at Bernard Lodge or those who are looking a ‘ting’ in 2020.

Independence was supposed to make us brighter, more humane and more attuned to the needs of our own people. Has it?

In 2021, what promise does the structure of a battered economy, and our political culture, hold for those communities whose young men see no better hope to make money lawfully than to fight for the bushing rights of a cemetery? What do they offer themselves? What does Jamaica offer them going forward?

It can be different – starting this year. Stop the injustice of evicting farmers from Bernard Lodge and elsewhere without compensation and adequate resettlement. How is that essentially different from the fate of the StThomas peasantry in the 1860s? What example does that treatment give to their descendants, the young people we want to engage in food production but consign to the most marginal or mined-out lands?

Spend more of the local currency which over-subscribes every IPO, the funds which grow the private and public security budgets every year, to have the army, HEART and HOPE join infrastructure projects, like the cemetery restoration, and discipline, train and offer genuine, lifelong work skills. That, not the lockdowns and the pitiful ZOSOs, will cause the guns to rust.

And please, the answer is not in increasing the Constituency Development Fund (CDF). Started with the best intentions and better than the nothing at all which preceded it, the CDF cannot be a substitute for a comprehensive, non-partisan public works and social welfare system.

Relying on the CDF is another popular delusion. Inevitably partisan and inadequate, administering it demeans, distracts and tribalises the role of the political representative and substitutes party-influenced ‘boopses’ for the justice of a governmental system which provides for the reasonable needs of all who are vulnerable.

Putting faith in the Queen, the British, American or Chinese Raj, or the hegemony of finance, colour or class, to redeem the social order, is idolatry.

My prayer for us in this New Year is for the grace to think compassionately and truthfully; to plan creatively and implement radically.

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