YESTERDAY BARBADOS celebrated its 49th anniversary of Independence with a few activities that hardly strayed from the traditional. Today, in essence the country starts what is expected to be a full year of celebration of what will be a significant milestone – the 50th anniversary of the attainment of nationhood.
In his official message to mark yesterday’s landmark, Prime Minister Freundel Stuart made a number of important comparisons between where we were when we started and what we have been able to achieve to date.
For example, he made the contrast between traditional economic activities like agriculture in general and sugar in particular, which have brought the country so much gain, and the investments we are now making in the cultural industries and renewable energy to take us forward.
As he drew attention to these developments, the Prime Minister was making it clear that we cannot rest on our successes, but must constantly look for new avenues that can sustain our standard of living and propel our children into the future.
We endorse Mr Stuart’s assertions, but remind all Barbadians that there are critical aspects of our traditional culture that we should never abandon, regardless of what new industries and sectors we cultivate or how far we are able to push our development so we continue to score high on all the international indices that are used to measure growth.
By now it must be clear to all that too many of us are showing an increasing disregard for our brothers and sisters, and our emphasis on the attainment of material wealth too often is characterised by an “at any cost” attitude.
What those who practise such approaches, especially those who sit at the top of the food chain, seem not to recognise or accept is that as long as we continue to engage in such behaviour, the divide between the contented and the discontented will widen, and with it the probability of social unrest.
Already we are seeing in many of our young people an attitude of intolerance, a phenomenon that has been fuelled by a failure of those who were responsible for nurturing them to pass on the values that they themselves received from their parents.
It is therefore vitally important as we celebrate 50 years of Independence that we ensure that the true meaning of the lyrics of our National Anthem, the words of our National Pledge and the thoughts that led to the adoption of our National Motto are understood and appreciated.
And as a first step, our national leadership might want to seriously consider the number of Barbadians who become totally dumb when it comes time to sing our Anthem or recite the Pledge because they just don’t know them.
No doubt, a year from now as our political leaders begin to trumpet their case for election or re-election, as we are bombarded by all the evidence of national development that supposedly places us ahead of developing countries all over the world, as we are feted in celebration of 50 years of achievement, we will be even more concerned about social ills if we fail to respond to this decline in values.
By all means, let’s party – but let us also never forget all that our nation-builders did to get us here, and what is now our duty to ensure we leave a legacy that does not betray their effort.
