The Bahama Journal’s front-page headline of Thursday, January 23, 2003 read: “Police Frustrated.” Indeed not only are the police frustrated but so is our New Providence Community; and we predict that this status quo will remain as long as business as usual continues to be the modus operandi of the nation. We have said this on numerous occasions, but who is really listening?
The story under the headline to which we refer spoke of all the frustration the police are incurring because the government was dragging its feet in reviewing the Bail Act, the court system being too lax and slow, and the failure of the justice system to carry out the barbaric law of state executions. “We’ve got to start hanging some people,” a high-ranking police officer was quoted as saying. The problem needed to be addressed in this way, he thought, because in his opinion they, whoever “they” is, were “stockpiling murderers in Fox Hill Prison.”
The Deputy Prime Minister, whose position earlier advocated carrying out the law of state execution, seems to have shifted of late, according the article. She could remember murders continuing while the state was carrying out hangings; and so such barbaric practices were obviously not a deterrent to crime as the high-ranking officer was saying. “I think the bottom line is prayer…. This whole nation needs to go before God because the world is troubled…Violence seems to be everywhere.”
Indeed we should always pray, and from all of the hundreds of churches on this island, there must be a whole lot of praying going on. Yet there seems to be no let up in criminal activity and there won’t be as long as criminality remains deeply embedded in our culture, as found by our recent Crime Commission.
It would seem that our people have a split personality. We are extremely religious on the one hand, professing tat Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour, and very worldly and materialistic on the other. The gospel of Jesus seems not to undergird our daily lives as strongly as that of the devil. We are therefore challenged to find ways to translate the “good news” to the very core of our Christian society from its basic unit the family.
In this column of December 18th of last year we tried to show how governments in developing countries especially are probably the greatest contributor to many of the social problems facing their nations, oftentimes without realizing it. On the one hand many of these governments employ autocratic methods to gain power and control people, while on the other they perpetuate a socialistic dependency on them to solve all the problems of the people.
The two approaches to running a democratic country are doomed to fail. The autocratic approach as we see in raising children dis-empowers and often produces extremists in adulthood.
Persons growing up in this kind of environment would ordinarily become passively aggressive, drop out of society all together, or become overly aggressive, especially in gangs when confronting persons weaker than themselves. Research shows that many abusers coming from this kind of family system, which, when supported and perpetuated by the legal and political society, will produce all sorts of maladjusted personalities. They’re living dead.
On the other end of the spectrum is the dependency approach, in which government usurps much of the power and responsibility of the family. Government becomes the ultimate standards by which we live, even though it does not want to take responsibility for the negative impact it has on the formation of its people. Government has become much too big for and intrusive in the lives of individuals, their families and communities; and instead of relinquishing the stolen power, it has tried to become even bigger and more consumingly intrusive.
Family responsibilities of the past have now been taken over by our big national government ministries and local government as their extended minions. Every major utility of power, communication, water, transportation and security are controlled by government; and our disempowered, angry, and marginalized people are left at their mercy. Not satisfied with the control of these, government has moved to control junkanoo, sports, and other social activities at tremendous financial and social cost to the nation.
Under our system of government we will continue to encounter failure in many facets of socio-economic activity because government is not the best agent for success. Government can never take the place of families and the other private entities that are better suited to building self-identity, pride and self-reliance. Too often it is driven by devotion to party, which breeds lots of divisiveness, inertia, distrust, dependency, hate, frustration and anger – all of which contribute to our present state of affairs – Television, computers and other electronic gadgets also contribute to the disintegration of the family, and so society.
Government, as well as business, should therefore make it their priority to strengthen the family by promoting family-friendly environments for the healthy growth of children. They should support, encourage, and invest in parenting, family life and marriage preparation programmes. They should move swiftly toward giving back the power to communities to run themselves and not force them to wear the same mandated capsize politically, socially, economically and culturally. The idea of an all-pervasive government necessarily strips people of their God-given rights to individuality and self-identity, which is the primary call of the family. That’s where values are grounded.
Does government have the courage, vision and will to let go?
By Vincent L. Ferguson, Viewpoints, The Bahama Journal
