BARBADIANS are more than ordinarily concerned about the startling developments and the increasing potency of the firearms unlawfully in the hands of those who have no authority to possess, far less use them, is an additional cause for concern.
Many suggestions are being made about the remedy for this social ill ranging from calls for an amnesty to harsher punishments for those found guilty of breaking laws against the illegal possession or use of firearms.
People are talking openly of a lost generation as if the horse has bolted the stable and there is nothing we can do to get it back under control. There can be no easy solution at this stage, since the young people caught in the web of guns and drugs and deviance of that sort are in their late teenage years to their mid thirties; and are making bad choices.
Economists the world over tell us that these years are said to be the most productive years of a person’s life and if hundreds of our young people find themselves behind bars waiting trial or serving sentences then we have a major problem in this society. It has to be tackled now, but should have been tackled at least twenty years ago.
We are not convinced that a baby is born into this world as a criminal. Nor do we accept that the proverbial gold, silver or bronze spoon must be present in the infant’s mouth to follow a life free from crime. Instead inappropriate conditioning can more often conduce to deviant behaviour than anything else.
Cultural penetration has been rightly blamed for some of our ills, but that is only part of the story. For at the very moment when such penetration was emerging as a threat, we did what the good books of all times told us not to do. We publicly removed the ancient landmarks of our moral and social culture, and norms of acceptable behaviour.
Parents failed to use the home as a reinforcement of the accepted ways of social behaviour, and parents could not tell the child to “come back”.
Sunday school became a perverted nickname for the promotion of a bashment culture in the open air, and the breeding ground for social decadence and fallout was well and truly laid. We may be late, but yet we must make an all-out effort to stem the tide.
Those 52 young people who won awards for academic excellence as well as our young sports and cultural ambassadors, and the majority of our young citizens, have all shown us how discipline and hard work can keep the young on a straight and narrow path and can lead to rewarding lives free from the taint of crime and deviance.
All over this world are to be found success stories of those born in deprived circumstances who have conquered the heights of personal success through the practice of wholesome values. There is no need to call names, but in most cases if not all, some beneficial influence of a parent or elder in that person’s life pointed and assisted in steering the way forward.
As the old African saying reminds us, it takes a village to raise a child, and we all say that tourism is our business, but raising our children in the right way is the more so our business, and the entire society, from Government to the church right through to parents, has a combined responsibility to get the horse back in the stable. We must act now.
It can never be too late to save half of our future.
