It has often been said that youth is wasted on the young, and to some extent that statement may be true, because hindsight is often the best sight. As adults we may therefore revisit the folly of our youth, and we may thus be able to see where we may have gone wrong.
Of course, that is not a good reason to berate the youth because they may not yet have the wisdom to recognize the hidden dangers in the pathways of this life, and in a sense we must all learn from our own mistakes although some of us are smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others.
Currently much unsavoury news about youth is making the headlines, and this may give the impression that there is widespread recklessness and misbehaviour among that segment of the population. But we are obliged to remark on some aspects of youthful behaviour that we think should be held up as indicators of a better and different approach being demonstrated by what we feel must be more representative of our young people.
We are not talking of the efforts of Kirani James or Keshorn Walcott or any other young Caribbean national at the recent Olympics only. Those achievements bear their own very important story, because they represent the end product of discipline, hard work, commitment and aspiration, all of which were combined with excellent execution to bring desired success.
The same hard work is necessary for academic or business success or to achieve prominence in one’s chosen trade or profession, whether pursued through study at the University of the West Indies, the Barbados Community College or the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic. And the same is true if one has progressed, as it were, through the apprenticeship scheme to establish one’s car repair or other repair business.
We must not fail to laud these achievements, for no country can be built upwards by those whose names make the headlines frequently because of their deviant behaviour, or because they may be the leader of the neighbourhood gang, or because they are so often in penal institutions that they know the architecture of such places better than those who planned and built them in the first place.
Instead, we must, for example, continue to hold up as proper examples those 9 000 members of the Barbados Public Workers Credit Union Thrift Club, which now has an asset base of some $10 million dollars. That is not chicken feed.
The club is the youth arm of the credit union, and Mr Glendon Belle, the credit union’s president, recently said that he was proud of the growth of the youth arm.
We are equally proud of these 9 000 young people, and every one of them is rendering remarkable public service to this country. Their fine examples must be held up and lauded, and we congratulate and laud each one of them.
