Ronald Thwaites | Facing our realities

Clare works in one of Elon Musk’s companies in California. Her application for leave to attend a family event in Jamaica was refused at first because of the US government travel advisory warning foreigners of the dangers of visiting the island. Same time as the tourism officials here have been insisting that the advisory “A no nuttin”.

Same time as travel insurance rates for Jamaica vacationers are spiking and, as the heads of two major hotel groups in Jamaica note, increased cancellations and depressed forward bookings caused by fear of violence and stoked by the negative travel advisory. One of these men even has the truthful impudence to tell our Government that “they are asleep at the switch”, obviously alleging diplomatic inertia. I am embarrassed at his unchallenged ‘liberty-taking’.

Who are we to believe? Well, I believe those who are not trying to hide away from the problem behind incomprehensibly rosy police statistics which defy experience, let alone popular perception (check the polls). There is new evidence which suggests that the flow of arms and ammunition into Jamaica continues unchecked.

Facing our reality requires a violence- and crime-reduction strategy endorsed and prosecuted by both political parties engaging the rest of us. That is what progressive politics should be about. Instead, the rubble of the once-hopeful Vale Royal Talks now resemble the decrepit building itself – abandoned to the chi-chi of tribalism and self-disrespect, with us the losers – again.

BUY A WATER TRUCK

Add to that the unlikely promises about water relief for Negril. Did we not see this coming? Face reality. It is going to take months, and likely years, to navigate the ‘wide Sargasso Sea’ of procurement, tender and execution before any of the major water supply improvements happen. And because we have normalised corruption, despite the urgency, we tie our own hands and waste the few shackles we have.

Please, can we get out of our own way, face the realities together, and do better for all of us.

UNREAL CONSENSUS

The impasse regarding constitutional change was entirely predictable. King Charles, don’t worry yourself. Your sleeping quarters in Kings House are safe. It’s your place. I appeared in a country courthouse last week and everyone prayed “God save the King” – the ostensible source of justice – as it was in the beginning from 1655 and during slavery days, is now, and apparently will be for a long time as we purposely stumble over ourselves.

Face reality. There is no real sovereignty created or recovered by becoming a republic while still having to beg the likes of the ingratiating Lord Reid in London to vindicate our rights in the colony.

The present stalemate has everything to do with political expediency in the year-long run-up to elections. Marlene and Andrew have promised out themselves as the architects of constitutional change. They are falling on their own sword. Having contorted “incrementalism” to avoid, by postponing, the determination of an appropriate final court and maintaining a no-longer-cute ambivalence about the federal court, they are asking us now to be consensual about what amounts to half-sovereignty, where we would continue to genuflect for justice before the monarch, who you say we have just “moved on” from.

EEDIAT BUSINESS DAT!

No. We are not going to be sucked into your set-hand. You seem to care who can claim paternity for modernizing the constitution. We don’t care really but we don’t like your trying to make us wear your ‘jacket’. Most of us just want change done sensitively with the inevitable staging aligned with our urgencies – not yours.

Sorry, we trust neither your process nor your timetable. You already told us that you intend to abrogate some of our constitutional liberties.

NEUTERED ACCOMPLICES

The real distress is the silence, and thus the complicity, of the sectoral representatives on the Reform Committee – the church people, youth and civil society ‘delegates’ – who clearly are not listening to the surly indifference of the people; who have been lured into oaths of secrecy and so must bear co-responsibility with the proto-colonists for the present flop.

Get real ministers: consensus doesn’t mean everyone else agreeing with you. To think so is just another instance of the insipid arrogance which now defines so much of your style of governance.

SCHOOL DISORDER

All lyrics which trivialise the beauty and sacredness of sex or glorifies violence and cruelty are bound to seep into the behaviour culture of our children. There is abundant evidence of that for all to see. Minister Williams is correct in her diagnosis. She, unlike others, is facing reality. Trouble is, she does not have the tools, nor is there the consensus (that word again!) to curb the confusion between wholesome liberalism and selfish libertarianism.

No one want to censor what passes for musical expression. But everyone better be concerned with the inculcation of proper values and attitudes applicable to everybody. This is where Castro and Lee Kuan Yew had a common, if for us misapplied, understanding.

The school I visited last week bears out the point. Despite experienced teachers, the eighth grade boys, with typical low literacy levels, are out of control. Bored, because they don’t much comprehend English; strangers to their heavy and expensive books, because they can’t read; and fearless of sanction, because the worst that can befall them is the holiday of suspension.

Often hungry and tired, they routinely fight, babble the doggerels spewed from the sound systems, the ‘bashment’ buses or from their tablets; they openly express their preference for scamming rather than conventional learning.

Facing that reality is the national challenge and ought to be the purpose of concerted political and community activity. The teachers in that school advise that an intense programme of attitudinal change is required before even starting what would best be a vastly revised curriculum. Does the society and especially the political culture have the stomach to face such requirements to change our reality? What else matters? See Matthew 18: 5-9.

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.