Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. – Carl Sandburg
On November 30, 2016, Barbados will celebrate 50 years of Independence as a nation. Congratulations! What an achievement! It deserves a time of rejoicing. In his message to the citizens of Barbados on the occasion of Barbados’ 49th year of Independence, Prime Minister Freundel J. Stuart made some profound statements that are worthy of repeating. Today I shall highlight some of them within the framework of marriage and family.
The main anchor that stoutly stabilises any society is the family. Without such steadiness, the social, educational, moral, economic and spiritual pillars, on which a progressive society depends, may wobble out of place and over time create the kind of catastrophic collapse too great to fathom.
One of Prime Minister Stuart’s statements that resonated with me was: “As we make the journey to celebration of 50 years of Independence, however, we must make the transition from nationhood to real independence. Decolonisation remains incomplete until there is complete decolonization of the mind.”
Currently, the minds of Barbadians and other sovereign states are pressured relentlessly and sometimes threatened by external international human rights entities within and supported by “developed” countries to rebrand marriage and family to reflect their “new normal” which suggests that marriage should no longer be exclusively between a man and a woman. Sometimes when opposed, some of these powerful countries may threaten economically vulnerable nations by dangling the “financial carrot” before their faces.
Prime Minister Stuart was on target when he remarked that the “decolonisation of the mind . . . requires us to realise that we have to take the lead in shaping our own future; that no one anywhere owes Barbados a living.” He may have been echoing the sentiments of Barbados’ Father of Independence, Errol Walton Barrow, whose words should continue to act as a barometer for Barbados as it reaches 50 years as a nation. Former Prime Minister Barrow said: “We shall not involve ourselves in sterile ideological wranglings because we are exponents not of the diplomacy of power, but of the diplomacy of peace and prosperity . . . . We will be friends of all, satellites of none.”
The thought by some individuals that these developed countries are “more progressive” in their way of thinking must be put under the microscope when one considers some of these countries own expressed serious internal family life issues. Great Britain and the United States, for example, who are very strong advocates for a new brand of family life, give Barbados and other independent countries a lot to digest intellectually.
After the riots, Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Britain as “his broken society” as reported in The Guardian newspaper of August 15, 2011, and pledged to “turn around the lives of 120 000 most troubled families back at the top of my political agenda . . . because the social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face”. With a boast of nearly 100 per cent literacy, Barbados must honestly ask if Britain is qualified to give direction to its people as it pertains to marriage and family.
In the Unites States, Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Resources highlighted the gravity of the mental health issues that face that country as reported in USA TODAY on February 4, 2013. She spoke of bipolar and major depression being responsible for more than 300 million days per year in productivity loss and 63 billion dollars in losses to the workplace. She said “mental health conditions place a greater burden on our economy than cancer or heart disease”. She lamented that three quarters of adult mental health conditions are appearing before age 24, and that her country is also grappling with 38 000 suicides each year, more than twice the number of homicides.
Those statistics alone speak in a small way to the enormity of some underlying family-related issues facing this developed country, which challenges the whole world to enjoy its “dream”. Is it ironic that a country with such challenging mental health and grave deep-seated social problems is generous enough to guide the world into an alternative to the Creator’s blueprint for marriage and family?
Again Prime Minister Freundel Stuart hit the nail on the head when he remarked: “What Barbados becomes over the next fifty years will depend on . . . what standards we are prepared to set and to what core values we are prepared to subscribe.”
Barbados must never send a signal to so-called developed countries that it has to accept their alternative brand of family life, which when carefully taken to its logical conclusion, falls ridiculously short of the necessary ingredients fit for sustainable and successful social development.
Prime Minister Stuart summed up beautifully where our central focus should be when he said: “Our efforts as a people will all come to naught if we forget to look upward to God, on whose strength, on whose inspiration, and on whose guidance our success as a nation will continue to depend over the next 50 years and beyond”. Powerful expression.
Let us therefore keep God on our side, for it is then we need not embrace doubts or fears. Confidently we can climb “upward and onward . . . inspired, exulting, free and greater will our nation grow in strength and unity”.
My personal suggestion to my Prime Minister is that since family life is the backbone of any society, without which all areas of the society’s progress and production will rise or fall, he should seriously consider establishing a clearly defined Ministry of Family that will work closely with family-life oriented agencies to foster practical steps that would enhance the quality of family life in Barbados.
Our track record shows that we have the tested and proven capability to indelibly “write our names on history’s page with expectation great, strict guardians of our heritage, firm craftsmen of our fate”.
Haynesley Griffith is a marriage and family life consultant. Email: griffitharticles@gmail.com