Ronald Thwaites | Defeating ourselves

When expediency trumps principle, when selfishness or drunken power overtake self-restraint and mutuality, tragic damage is done to the human experience. Share with me some local and international instances in last week’s news.

IS THIS LOVE?

First was the story of two woman being charged with the killing or wounding of other females involved in what is antiseptically called “love triangles”. In each case the man goes free leaving one of his concubines mauled or dead with the other behind bars. Where is the “love” in that “triangle”? What happens to the children of whichever liaison? Multiple sexual partnerships produce bad social outcomes. If you can’t resist, please don’t have children.

SELF-DISRESPECT

Then in the US, newly available evidence indicates that the billionaire lecherous paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, combolo of the pedigree of Clinton, Trump and Prince Andrew, had molested over one thousand women, among them mostly minors, over a period of years.

Where were the parents of these females? What could have been the inducement, let alone the moral indifference which allowed them to overlook or condone their children’s promiscuity? What values at home or school were taught these females who squandered their self-esteem for fun or money?

And how is it that none of these women cared enough about their own dignity to “bawl out” at the time or deprive Epstein of his cullions on the spot?

SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

Which takes us to the “baby-hair” issue. Schoolgirls are being defended for styling themselves with these adornments while at class. Some pseudo-libertarians are asserting that dressing and grooming however you want is a sacred expression of long-repressed self-identity and so should be subject to little or no regulation. Try to run any home, business or orderly society like that.

Self-expression, absent self-discipline and reasonable order results in chaos. That is the situation in many Jamaican schools right now. It contributes greatly to the poor results we keep getting and frustrating our teachers to the point of migration.

WASTING OPPORTUNITY

Grooming and manners establish and reflect standards. As it is, up to a third of class time is wasted just trying to maintain order and attention. Disorder posing as legitimate freedom boomerangs on those parents and children themselves who claim reasonable school rules to be an abridgement of their rights.

The views expressed recently in this space by Basil Jarrett and Stewart Jacobs on this issue are to be supported. What is the position of the influential Jamaica Teachers’ Association? The current palsied Education Code of 1980 is a hindrance rather than a help in dealing with productivity in education.

NO OVERREACH

The expectation by some that the Ministry of Education can prescribe school rules for institutions not owned but assisted by the government, is misplaced. More than 40 per cent of schools are the property of or operated by churches and trusts. Each is governed by a board on which the State is represented but does not control. It is these boards who are competent to set school rules and enforce them. Of course they do so within legal boundaries but maintain considerable autonomy which must be respected.

Please leave them to do their work. What does it say about our principles when there is more discussion about hair style than about the increasing levels of campus disorder and illiterate graduates?

HUSTLERS

Care must be taken that we do not groom our children to adopt the me-first, me-alone hustler mentality which pervades the society. Nowhere is this more evident than on our roads where doing whatever you can to get ahead is now the well-learned norm modelled daily by the taxi fleet, police vehicles and the entourage of the governing elite.

The rest of us experience greater stress, danger and declining productivity. Motor cyclists obey no rules, and selfishly abridge the rights of all. The police are increasingly ineffective. Again, disorder chokes progress.

“A NICE SHOOT-OUT”

That was how one smiling observer described the carnage which resulted in two shooting deaths in Mandeville last week. The scene showed walls speckled with high calibre bullet piercings. Instead of grief that human lives were lost, excitement and voyeurism prevailed. Have you noticed our national habit of running towards rather than away from danger? And how come there is apparently no shortage of very powerful weaponry in the country? A nice shootout indeed. Expect more.

RESPECTING LIFE

Everyone who believes that all human life is God’s gift and prizes free expression and association must condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the US far-right evangelist. This man considered the Civil Rights Act of 1965 to have been a mistake. He stoutly defended the Constitutional right to bear arms while admitting that this would mean that innocent people would be killed – just the fate he suffered. And he subscribed to the self-fulfilling paranoia that the purity of white America would soon be eclipsed by a race of brownings if migration of the tired and poor were not curtailed. As reprehensible and anti-Christian as those views are, neither he nor any other deserves to be slaughtered.

WHAT’S OUR STAND?

This is all the moreso in the major theatres of war on which Jamaica’s foreign policy appears cravenly silent. What position does conscience oblige us to take when the victims of one Holocaust become the perpetrators of another? Or when smaller nations like Ukraine are besieged by a stronger neighbour how secure is our own sovereignty anyway?

DANGER NEARBY

The Monroe Doctrine is clearly having a resurgence when the imperial power can bomb a boat in international waters and kill its occupants. Equally shameful is that a CARICOM Prime Minister can support such an act of war and by so doing implicitly accept that the Caribbean’s fate is to return to being a satellite of the metropole.

Beware the militarisation of democracy – there, anywhere or here.

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