Ronald Thwaites | ‘We have seen this before’

This was the fearful cry of some Germans after the Harris/Trump debate last week. Lies and uninformed opinions becomes fact in the cause of oppression. Prejudice is enthroned as dogma. Irrational fear is manipulated to justify authoritarianism and dictatorship. The Germans remember what happened to their national psyches a century and less ago: consciences blunted, repression normalised.

Donald Trump says he won the debate against Kamala Harris. Any objective viewer would have concluded otherwise. He simply can’t believe that his intellectual and moral midgetry was exposed by a feisty black woman.

So Kamala must be a Marxist, spawned from her Jamaican “Marxist” father. Haitians are eating people ‘s pets in Ohio. The number of proven, blatant lies spoken by Trump between 2016 and 2020 runs into thousands and thousands.

Continuing disregard for the truth has become a regular feature of the politics of a nation which we look up to because of its professed values and opportunity. Objectivity is denied when inconvenient. Reality is what I define it to be. Why not if self interest is the only worthy cause?

The narrowness of the far right and the libertarianism of what poses as the far left, end up denying any unifying ideology of the common good. This is fertile ground for despotism.

Trump says it. He will be dictator “for a day”! He will prosecute his political opponents and remake the public service in his MAGA image. He will deport millions of Haitians to Venezuela. And millions, even plenty black people, follow him. It’s happening in America – shining star of civilization, rich in no small part from the resources of the rest of humanity: the place where three quarters of Jamaicans would love to live.

CONTAGION?

We exist so much in the slipstream of our great northern neighbour that I fear mental and spiritual contagion. That’s why I wanted an unequivocal affirmation of the Charter of Rights and the complete Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the first principles of our Constitutional Reform process. Republicanism and the ceremonial president come way down the hierarchy of priorities after those.

The people leading the reform process are foisting on us issues which really don’t trouble us while ignoring the dis-ease of the majority of the population- the lurch towards a police state, the increasing number of inner city boys who Herbert Gayle correctly calls “the most neglected and oppressed group of humans in Jamaica”; the unchecked creep of prime ministerial power and the increasing disconnect between reward and productive outcomes.

Illiteracy, in its broadest sense, is the vector of the contagion of selfishness and inappropriate values. If you can’t read you depend on someone else to think for you. Literacy is yoked to numeracy and the capacity for informed, not reflexive, critical thinking and the cultivation of generous, mature judgments and life choices. More than a third of school-leavers fall into this definition of illiteracy every year.

FALSE NARRATIVE

Look here, we are too bright and God-blessed a people to fall into the false narrative that some of our leaders are creating for us. Police killings are up and we are being lured into believing that this will somehow lead to the extermination of violent crime. The justice system is creaking under the load of serious criminal cases and a porous, corrupt prison system where inmates, most of them unconvicted, are half-starved, unemployed and left to rot. Just ask Vybz.

If you won’t believe him, emancipate yourself from the mental slavery of the daily public relations lies by listening to Professor Orlando Patterson identifying “over a third of (urban lower class) youth either completely disconnected from work and school or experiencing unemployment ... protected by criminal dons who fill the governmental vacuum left by the state and hounded by corrupt and incompetent police who kill them with impunity”. (The Confounding Island)

Or disabuse yourself of our latent racism by accepting Professor Herbert Gayle’s research that only 33 per cent of inner city poor males attend school every day. As long as this is so, how can crime be sustainably controlled?

UNHELPFUL POLITICAL CULTURE

This is the season of political conferences and maybe, by (and “by-by?)-elections. Where do these monumental and prosperity-crushing realities figure in our current national discourse?

I challenge the promising Matthew Samuda to champion the elevation of the primary and high schools in North Eastern St.Ann to become as good as Jessie Rippol, St. Richard’s, Campion, St Hilda’s and York Castle in five years. What could be of greater impact on the lives involved and the national well-being? The same challenge must apply to each and every PNP candidate emerging from the party’s pre-election conference.

Parents who want good for their children must be mobilized not to oppose or attack teachers who insist on discipline and tidy grooming but to insist that assistance be available whenever necessary for mandatory school attendance not only by their children but also by teachers who are allowed far too much latitude for absence by the archaic Code of 1980.

NON-NEGOTIABLE

Parents, do not accept anything less than that your child is reading and computing at grade level and is getting a solid dose of manners, civics and spiritual values before promotion. Demand, as Mandela insisted, that Jamaican education must mean comprehensive human development – not just examination passes. Graduation of your kid must mean more than a phony dress-up parade.

National Parent Teachers Association, your voice should be as insistent and persuasive as that of the teachers’ union. It is in the demand for effective education that ordinary citizens can have most influence on the nation’s future.

Literacy in its broadest sense is the surest road to prosperity, the defence against alienated youth and the best antidote to the deluge of authoritarianism that “we have seen before”.

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.