Ronald Thwaites | Way to go

“Me have some new zinc sheet a sell. You want it fi one a yu church memba dem whey house blow down?” That was the offer from one of the few recipients who had received his rebuilding grant last week.

Turns out he had suffered severe damage and really needed help. But the $200,000 couldn’t buy much of what he needs to restore, and even if the money was more, the supplies are not available. High demand, stocks weak, prices soar, relief diminished.

Then, too, my guy has lost his livelihood. The fishing boat off of which he used to mek a smalls, “it mash up”. Food is short.

“So mi tek di zinc whey di money could buy, use few sheet as siding for the shed where mi live and gwan sell the rest to mek di pickni dem stop bawl fi hungry since the white people and dem food package gone. Yu want dem – cheap, cheap?” There is very little the involuted state processes can do about this man’s situation.

He was told by someone who he describes as a “politics man” that if he gives him $250,000, he could make sure he gets “one a di container dem”. No possibility there. His parting, hopeless shot is, “ Yu cyan get one of Fadda Holung board house fi mi?”

Building Back Better

? Last week, the prime minister encouraged Jamaicans, including my zinc sheet hustler, to avoid a “victim mindset” and to “use resources wisely”. A few days later, Mrs Fayval Williams, the finance minister, correctly advised tertiary students to choose student loans over credit-card facilitated consumerism.

But who is setting an example of self-restraint and prudence in this society wobbling in the nervous slipstream of advancing Trumpism, domestic authoritarianism, lawlessness, and extrajudicial response? Certainly not the arrogant political class who have helped themselves so liberally to the cash sucked out of the “victims” pockets with scant accountability. Check the Public Accounts Committee or the defensive bullying which characterises proceedings of the House of Representatives.

Why vote for that system, young people ask. The rest of us are the victims of such habitual advantage-taking. The Probox taxi cut in front of me in the line at Papine.

A regular occurrence for all road users. These hustlers, the police and the blue-light politicians exempt themselves from the chaos which they themselves create or ought to help abate. They use power and resources to reinforce and engender the “victim mentality”, which Andrew correctly identifies as sapping virtue and cooperation.

We are a follow-fashion people, and the model put before our children and all of us is that the supreme objective of life is to have my way and gain my advantage whoever else have to get jook.

Beautiful Contrast

The season of Easter, by the sharpest of contrasts, engages the true story of One who uses absolute power to become vulnerable then victim of His creation so as to model a set of principles, a way of life where there are no outcasts, no sanctified advantage-taking, no life-sapping inequalities. Instead, the peace and joy of community, of life-pilgrimage towards a moral prosperity, a material sufficiency, which overcomes even the banality of physical death. This ethic redefines and elevates individual life purpose, erases any “victim mentality”, forgives rather than kills or oppresses; propels rethinking of Constitution and law, the ordering of political economy and social interchange.

No more need to hustle meager relief supplies to get food or contribute to road mayhem. No more use of hungry people’s wealth to “bomb Iran into the Stone Age where they belong” or to excuse blood-letting as the cure for blood-letting as we, “Mimic Men” indeed, institutionalise locally. Crazy idealism or worthy objective to be pursued, especially by a small and vulnerable people who, indeed, have been victims for so long and willfully, who won’t yet agree among ourselves how to “use resources wisely”?

Just look at the clear and present danger of distorting Melissa reconstruction to prop up flagging political fortunes instead of as a scaffolding to reconstruct national spirit. Pope Francis used to pray “May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, superficial relationships so that you will live deep within your heart …” No wonder entitled persons, even in his own church, sneered at him. His prayer, which ought to be foundation for political behaviour as for spiritual growth, goes on: “May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you will work for justice, equality, and peace.”

Leadership matters if you want to change culture; to alter a prevailing mindset. The leadership of the cross is the defining model. So also is that of Marcus and our heroes who identified the victim mentality in the bent psyches of the slave progeny and devoted their live to the holy ideal that there is divinity and worth in all creation – that victimhood can become servanthood.

Compare what obtains nearby. More than a trillion dollars is being sought from the world’s treasury to wage war, to build empire and boost egotism same time as hunger, mass illiteracy, wokeism, family disintegration, and mass imprisonment prevail in plain sight: live and direct. And some say there is no Satan, no hell.

Fortunately, our history and our present are peopled with so many, theists and humanists, who enflesh the Easter ideal. Take heart from the school principal whose day begins before dawn to personally prepare porridge for hungry students so that they can learn something. Or another educator, who rose to the pinnacle of the profession, now devoted to rehabilitating the weakest and most wounded, heedless of cost and effort.

These models, in every sphere, many but not yet enough, show how to “use our resources wisely” and are antidotes to the pervasive “victim mentality”. Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education.

He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.