Hilary Robertson-Hickling, Contributor
THE YEAR 2006 takes us into the second half of the first decade of the new millennium and there are some issues which we must address for our nation's survival. While we celebrate the positive aspects of our culture, we have to identify and address the negative aspects.
Our national culture or way of life includes our institutions, philosophy, psychology and many other aspects; this culture has allowed us to overcome adversity, to have a vision of a better world, and to be creative. We have been able like the farmer in that wonderful picture to sit on his donkey with his crops in the hampers and speak on his cellphone. We have the ability to employ the best of our traditions and the best of modernity and post-modernity.
When we have channelled our legendary aggression to winning in sports, and business and other endeavours, that is good. But we have channelled the aggression into the sport of killing or 'making a duppy.' Some of our popular music extols the virtues of violence and we show our admiration for people and music with gun salutes. There are communities in which young adolescent boys are armed to the teeth and where killing has become child's play. There are parents who have abdicated the responsibility of raising their children and the
evidence is visible everywhere.
EIGHT CHILDREN EIGHT FATHERS
The state cannot be responsible for the eight children of a woman who has chosen as her partners men who refuse to support their children. Such parents should be punished as they have abandoned their children and the results are well known. We have to cease being ambivalent about the need to punish wrongdoers whatever their social class. We have developed an industry of apologists for wrongdoing and it is leading us astray.
There is too much debate and too little consensus about the rules which govern our behaviour in our society. This is fast becoming a country where anything goes; we can say and do anything that we please and there is no consequence. This is a laissez-faire or free-rein country.
COMPARED TO SINGAPORE
How can we possibly compare ourselves to first-world Singapore which now has a per capita income more than five times that of Jamaica? Instead of focusing on the virtues of our so-called freedom we need to seriously learn from those who have found the way to develop their economies to such levels. We may be developing Jamaica where we become 'free to starve". No country is perfect as it is made up of human beings who are not divine, but we cannot continue to talk and allow things to fall apart.
We need to find economic solutions to our problems, there is too much unemployment and underemployment and we are producing a workforce which is underproductive by comparison with our competitors across the world. From my vantage point as a university lecturer, I do not think that our young people realise the level of competition that awaits them. While we continue the debate about the Jamaican nation language millions of others are busy mastering the English language and getting the jobs in the call centres and elsewhere. Athletes, policemen and women, singers and others are being interviewed on national and international television in English and we have to stop the explanation about why we cannot master the language. Nobody is interested anymore. This country needs a national plan and action, we have to develop and utilise strategies to transform the national culture for survival.
Hilary Robertson-Hickling is a lecturer in the Department of Management Studies. UWI, Mona.
