WARNING: This is not going where you think it is going!
Sex on the mind. What child? Marc and Kamisha, 20 and 18, respectively, find themselves together in a dark, yet inviting place. Their lips taste each other hungrily. Tongues slide over sweat-filmed skin. Breath pants. And pants drop.
To make a long story short, they do it. No contraceptive.
A year later a baby boy screams blue hunger or colic or “clean me”. And they are both too young to fathom what it is all about, still craving more sex, and fun (“where de party at?”), and smartphones, and brand name wear and shiny things like bling and not into the fact that as this person grows he must avoid drugs, not mistreat women, not steal, or hang his hat where his hand can’t reach, or mark up people’s walls, or distress his neighbours with loud music or fail to keep his temper under control or refuse to pay his taxes or neglect to do the dozens of other things that would mark him as a socially responsible citizen . . .
Mr and Mrs Morgan live the good life. They wine and dine; next week it’s Miami for the sixth time this year – and not for business. Their home is palatial, and the garage, which is almost as big as some people’s houses, sports Lexus by two – SUVs, if you please. So, where’s Rory? Out driving his friends around – just got his own (big) ride at 18. Brianna, 15, is in her room, we think, studying for school – or is she on the phone or watching TV or on Facebook? . . .
Ramon, 27, likes to hang with the boys and has lots of time for it – he is unemployed. But he loves art – tattoos on his arms, to be precise. When he is not with his peeps, he is deep into his music – letting it groove him for hours on end.
Another young thing caught his eye and fancy a month ago, and absence of the child mother, off to her long-hours, minimum wage job, apparently made his heart go yonder. He dotes on his mother and she on him, so his two-year-old knows her care more than he does Ramon’s . . .
They invented the word “workaholic” to describe Trevor. I swear. The rushing out of the house to get into the office very early. The long hours. And then the paper trails him home. The constant phone calls, local and overseas. Daddy burns the midnight oil again and again, and he passes ten-year-old Tiffany like, as they say, a ship in the night.
But at least career-ladder-climbing Mum finds time to run her to dance classes and to netball and picks her up after lessons and Brownies . . .
And here is Petra, just the wrong side of too many children. Twenty-four with four, the last one barely out of arms, but she hasn’t seen Andre in weeks. Another woman in no man’s land. And no love, no money.
Looking on, you dredge up this old saying: “You fool me once, shame on you; you fool me twice, shame on me.” Or “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” What do you know? . . .
Many people obviously feel that parents such as those in the scenarios above are to blame for a lot of the society’s ills. So these days in Barbados, as people get anxious about crime and incivility in its various forms, they target parents.
And everybody seems to feel that that is the long and short of it. I don’t. So if you think that I wrote all of the above to knock those kinds of parents, think again.
We cannot expect that the sum of autonomous parts – like parents – of a society will give us the whole we desire. Different parents pursue their own agendas, which the powers that be cannot force-change.
And if appealing to parents is our main means of getting change, we might as well put up the white flag in surrender.
In saying that, I am not letting parents off the hook. I am simply highlighting the fact that from a management-of-change perspective you can’t have as your chief means of adjustment a focus on entities whose performing of their prime role you cannot democratically control. Neither can you expect that more moral suasion will bring about the shift that it has not done so far in these times.
The question is: what actions can we take that would have greater potential to really influence how parents operate?
More on that next week – God willing.
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email [email protected].
