Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
THE 2004 Emancipation panel discussion hosted by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission was held under the theme 'Reflections on our past, taking charge of the future'. It was a very enlightening, if not disturbing, discussion.
Forget about being disturbed by how few people turned up for the occasion; just remember that a poll in recent times found that 53 per cent of adult Jamaicans would still like to be clutching the hem of the royal garment for salvation.
Forget that the media houses had important stories to chase down like maybe who was the latest rape or murder victim, what was the venue of the latest birthday bash of this or that area leader, upcoming star, you know, the things that excite our collective imaginations and allow us to forget our troubles and dance.
DISTURBED
Now be disturbed by the fact that our present troubles form the basis of our future and will become the past that our grandchildren reflect on. What a prekkeh!
Take the sugar troubles, for example. Even the Prime Minister recognised that the bangarang might very well be a deliberate ploy for creating new inequities.
I would have said iniquities, but never mind. Just imagine the bile that it is going to create in the ruminations about whether we would have been better off if we had listened to Michael Manley in the days of the Non-Aligned Movement that we needed diversification in products and trading partners. That is just one aspect of the international present that the WTO and the European Union bestowed upon us as a gift for emancipation and independence. A most disturbing reminder of how France made Haiti pay for their independence. I fear there is more. Double prekkeh!
But never mind. What about the autoclaps that we bringing down on ourselves through drug-runnings, political short-sightedness, bloodletting inside and outside of mayoral chambers, don't-caring attitude and ignorance. Maybe all the prekkeh is predicated on ignorance, who don't know and who don't care to know, like all of those who absent themselves from any event in which the discussion seldom rises above who threw which party, how much lobster was eaten and how the bride was pretty in black.
None of which will help to produce the kinds of workers that the eloquent gentleman from NCB said recently were sadly lacking.
We give thanks for the annual graduation and school-leaving exercises that afford us the opportunity, perhaps like no other time of the year, to contemplate what we are becoming: our children become their parents.
Take this graduation ceremony, for example, at one of the traditional elite schools. Yes, there are schools that are still perceived, equipped and staffed that way despite official policy. Many have argued that indeed it is official policy to facilitate some schools to turn out 'ladies and gentlemen' and others to be the servers if not servants of said ladies and gentlemen. Like we produce sugar for ladies and gentlemen till they decide that the cause of their overbloated condition is that our sugar is too sweet and we are ill-equipped to respond.
DE-ROACHING
At the most recent 'Who will save our children?' forum organised by Dr. Claudette Crawford Brown and hosted by the University of the West Indies, Ibo Cooper observed that if we really want to have an idea of what Jamaica will be like say 10 years from now, we need look no further than the influences under which the present generation of youngsters falls. Anybody start packing yet? Nuh badda.
Just read Mervyn Morris' poem about some people who moved constantly in order to escape the roaches at the various places they moved into, and still the roaches came.
Seems to me like dem was moving with the roaches into dem likkle dulcimina grip and cardboard box when obviously they should have embarked on a de-roaching exercise.
Well there are some fabulous visionary roach exterminators, determined to rescue Jamaica and Jamaica's children from the failure to recognise that there is a difference between raising children and simply leaving them to grow up and that the way we negotiate the space in between will decide whether we succumb to the pestilence of cockroaches or arrive happily at a future without them.
DETERMINATION
Today we salute those people, particularly the staff and communities raising the children at Avocat Primary and Junior High in Buff Bay, Portland, at Carron Hall High School in St. Mary and at St. Thomas More Prep in May Pen. It is not just that these schools provide examples of the graduation ceremonies at which the parents were well-behaved, and heaven knows it is difficult to raise proper parents, it is the evidence they provided of a determination to build a community that not only could raise children well, but were seized of the conviction that a bright collective future is dependent on present collective involvement.
What a privilege to see a grade six child graduate as the first person in four generations who had learned to read and write.
So what does any of this have to do with the past, the present or the future? Maybe nothing, till the EU and the WTO wake us up with a redefinition of preferential treatment that seh dem prefer to treat we to what mek dem better off first and foremost, for slavery days dun lang time and dem doan owe we nutten and we have to decide for ourselves how we prefer to be treated.
We are going to have to produce our way to a better future and that begins with the production of a certain quality of citizenry, shaped in an understanding that if 2004 is the future of which Nanny dreamed, it is also a 2004 with the inequities produced by the system against which Nanny fought.
Give thanks for all those who dream a brighter future and raise children that give us hope.
