Martin Henry, Contributor
I am writing from the front page of Tuesday's Gleaner [May 6] and taking the road less travelled of multiple commentary.
"Danville walks: Director of elections resigns over US citizenship", "Lyn-Sue gets six months for fabricating evidence", "Child Month tips", the front page reported.
Let's begin with the 'Child Month' feature. The article offers suggestions for good child development saying parents can help their children become more confident by adopting the tips offered. One of my 'godchildren', only six, posed his father a profound question. And he is quite fortunate as a Jamaican child to have a father around to field his tough questions, walk him to school, and help him with his confidence issues. Most of the nation's children are not so blessed.
Confidence shaker
This very black child wanted to know why his daddy had not made him brown or yellow. He has already absorbed, largely from people who look just like him and are young just like him, that major confidence shaker that to be black is much less desirable in a black society than to be brown or yellow.
Beverley Anderson-Manley was on Monday publicly exorcising her own blackness demons in the pages of this newspaper which is serialising her book The Manley Memoirs. Those demons came from within the family, the future prime minister's wife reveals. "Because my colour was unacceptable, like my father's, my destiny too was to be good for nothing."
Constant battle
Sonny Boy is lucky to have validating parents - mother and father. Visibly black Jamaicans must fight a constant battle for self-validation and self-confidence in a social milieu in a 'black society' where brown is definitely 'better'.
Professor Errol Miller once did a study on self-image, including colour desirability, among Jamaican young people, with some very interesting results. Apparently, just as people don't want to be black, they don't particularly want to be white either. The preferred colour is the right shade of brown.
But there are other substantial challenges facing Jamaican children and youth this Child Month. Edward Seaga devoted a chunk of his inaugural lecture as UWI Distin-guished Fellow in May 2005 to discussing harsh child-rearing practices in Jamaica and their results in the weakening of the confidence of self and the security which children should be building and which "shapes insecurity in the maturing adult leading to submissiveness and lower levels of achievement, or hyper-aggressive, 'ignorant', responses". Father absence, in which Jamaica is a world leader, aggravates the situation.
"Shade-ism", as the cultural sociologist puts it, "is a reality in Jamaica". Then he points out that no profile of the psyche of Jamaican youth can ignore the demand for respect as one of the most dynamic [i.e. powerful] features of cultural identity, a prime driver of crime and violence and rooted in all those social factors which undermine respect.
Dr Maureen Samms-Vaughan performed a comprehensive tracing out of the "Challenges of Child-hood" in her 2006 GraceKennedy Foundation Lecture, "Children Caught in the Crossfire". There is a huge fear factor among children similar to what prevails in war and natural-disaster zones with an increasing incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder. And yet, children are determinedly happy. One of my own sources of joy is just to watch them romping up a storm after school, especially in rural Jamaica.
The past week was 'Reading Week', with 'Teacher's Day' in the middle. Today is 'Mother's Day'. One of the greatest success-enhancing, confidence-building gifts that a child can be given is consummate skill in reading and the love of it. Text is a great smasher of barriers, opener of doors, and liberator. Trust me; I know from delightful experience.
The price of principle
Danville Walker has walked away from the post of director of elections, head held high; and Detective Constable Carey Lyn-Sue is to spend six months in prison, both on principle. For Walker, the law must be upheld. For Lyn-Sue, a new Christian, the truth must be told.
Walker is one of the best-known and best-loved public servants ever whom people felt was a rock of defence against the chronic corrup-tion and inadequacies dogging the electoral system. But no one is above the law and the law stipulated that someone giving allegiance to a foreign state cannot hold the office of director of elections. Of more value to this country, battling bly and corruption and shadiness of another kind, than Walker's continued service as director of elections is his dignified, principled and timely resignation.
Perjury confession
Carey Lyn-Sue, an unknown police officer, before his confession to perjury, pays a higher price for principle than Danville Walker: Six months of incarceration in the horrible penal system of Jamaica. The law allowed up to three years. Church opinion and public opinion seem solidly weighted in favour of acquittal following confession. Perjury, lying testimony implicating others, is a serious crime.
Punishment of perjury, more widely applied in the justice system, would have a powerful dampening effect on 'bearing false witness', something which Christians are against.
Christians, more than most, used to recognise that faith was not a ticket to a free ride, but a call to suffering. The story is told of an early century Roman commanding officer leading a party of legionnaires sent to persecute Christians. When he observed the calm, peaceful and courageous disposition of one group sentenced to die, he stripped off his insignia, unbuckled his sword, gave them to his second in command, joined the Christians - and died with them, a believer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and pastor, before his imprisonment and martyrdom by the Nazis, penned the powerful book, The Cost of Discipleship. He had voluntarily returned to Germany from London, where he was safe, to confront the evils of Nazism from the inside. G.K.A. Bell, Bishop of Chichester, a friend of Bonhoeffer's, wrote of the man and his book, "When Christ calls a man," says Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "He bids him come and die." Carey Lyn-Sue, no theologian, seems to understand this. Principle, like discipleship, without cost, is worthless. But paying has never been easy - or popular.
