Flashback: Last week I said that having put forward (as the DLP has) that “Barbados is a society and not just an economy”, you en cutting it unless you focus on things that are inherent in the idea of society (togetherness, cohesiveness, community, brotherliness).
I also said you would have to develop shared values – because shared values are the bedrock of a society.
And then reality reared its responsible head, asking, how are you going form a society when lots of incomers are simply opportunists, are not particularly interested in, but are actually hostile to, you and your ways?
And I left the DLP to mull over that.
Not that Government should ultimately establish all the shared values (although in some areas that is bound to be the case). Certainly, their vibrancy will depend on other entities energetically pursuing them. But in all areas, it is always useful to have Government trumpeting, instigating, initiating, facilitating and putting moral suasion behind these things.
So, I press on today to some of the values that must become entrenched if we are going to lay claim to being a society in anything beyond a nominal sense. Things that tend us towards cohesion – or at least work against division.
Respect for fellow citizens’ rights is one. Failure in this area constitutes a serious fracturing of any society. Loud playing of music, littering, burning of “stuff”, abandoning of cars in residential areas readily come to mind as things that are brutishly disrespectful of others and should meet with a potent and uncompromising law enforcement response. These activities put people at enmity with one another – not a boon for togetherness.
There must be provision for a stronger people stake in governance – more meaningful avenues for them to grab hold of their democracy beyond town hall meetings and voting. Frameworks for more robust intervention into public affairs.
And away with the almost knee-jerk hostility to the Press, unless it is behaving like a politician’s public relations firm. Away with the ever-present “No comment” and “Attempts to reach [a public official] proved futile” and all these blockages that shut the people out of their own business.
Also, people must have quick and trustworthy recourse for inefficiencies, incompetence and malpractice from which they have suffered at the hands of public institutions. There must be ways for us to hold the police, teachers, nurse and others accountable. I mean complaints authorities that are serious about being the people’s watchdogs.
When people do not have access to serious redress, they are made to feel like second class citizens to public officials. How do you form a society out of that? You might as well be just an economy.
Giving back (not to be mixed up with charity) should be an emblematic Barbadian trait. Not many places in the world can boast of the level of freeness or near-freeness that Barbados provides for its people.
But you know what? We will spend time telling a man who sold another man a service or a product that he must give back – as though he got something he should not have. We want to tell Sir Charles Williams and Geoffrey Cave and James Husbands and David Bynoe and Desmond Haynes, who sold their services and were, as should be the case, paid for them that they should give back – and scarcely a word to the lawyers, doctors and thousands of others that got free university education.
Where are the well known pro bono services of the lawyers that we educated at far less than bargain basement cost to them? And where are the widely known free clinics by doctors who in many cases would probably not have been able to afford anywhere near what we paid to educate them in medical skill?
Not forgetting the others who paid a pittance to emerge from Cave Hill or Mona or St Augustine and wherever else with valuable tertiary education at the taxpayers’ expense.
Giving back is not charity – it is an ethical requirement in return for what the society has given you. Get moving on that and I would know that we really talking about being a society.
Of course, all of us should be charitable. But that’s a different thing.
I also must mention the hierarchical use of the Common Entrance Examination, about which I have said my piece elsewhere. That elitism-inducing use of a national assessment test is, unless you en looking, one of the most divisive things in Barbados.
You really study the implications of this society goal, DLP? Is a serious thing!
