On the value of restraint

THERE WERE lots of children and young people at the funeral. Except for a few, most chatted or checked their phones throughout the service and seemed uninterested in both prayer and song. At the end, though, they rushed to gawk at the corpse when the coffin was opened. “Jeesascrise! Weh di shat did ketch im?”

I enquired. None had been regularly or ever to Sabbath or Sunday school. But all had received up to 12 years of schooling. We talked. Restraint was regular for them – doing without food plenty times, holding down the anger for reprisal when beaten or disrespected, cowering when the police were around.

Growing up meant freedom – being able to do what you feel to do. That’s what being a ‘big’ man or woman means. “Nobody can’t talk to you.” Postponing gratification, sexual restraint, frugality and lifestyle simplicity are not concepts they were willing to entertain. Bling, sex, ‘crissas’ and, for some, guns are signs of the good life. Here or preferably abroad. And by any means necessary.

So on the altar of personal freedom, we are now discussing the taking of life by abortion and considering as oppressive the requirement of participation in school devotions because we worship God in a different way.

There is a national confusion equating individual freedom and unrestrained behaviour. Both Angela Brown Burke and Michael Stewart made reference to the problem in excellent speeches in Parliament last week, one dealing with community mores, the other with conduct in school. Anybody listening?

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Crassness gets described as freedom of expression. Check Parliament for that. We turn slackness and diatribe into a virtue to be cheered on, once it is directed at the opposing tribe. Absent restraint, look at leaders, mayhem and squalor surrounding all, chortling and defining them as prosperity!

And we are about to legitimise the disorder, danger and waste on the roads as our children learn by experience more effective lessons than any teacher can teach about order and the restraint of personal impulse needed to establish and maintain the good life for all.

For if every ‘robot’ operator and the thousands to come can define their routes and all be licensed, the chaos, congestion and lawlessness of transportation will be the certain outcome.

The mentality that proposes this kind of scheme follows naturally from the sentiments and conduct of the young persons earlier described. It is the ultimate ‘run wid it’ – politically popular, but socially and economically disastrous.

Has the Government thought through the consequences of the masquerade of a largely unrestrained market in public transportation? Don’t they see the boorishness and clog, now to be legalised, that neither road extension nor a new Road Traffic Act can avert? What will be the result of even more bank credit being sucked up into motorvehicle purchases, and who will pay for the inevitably increased deficits of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC)?

Is all this the national transportation policy that former minister Mike Henry told me was being developed? Really? Does anybody remember the unbridled ‘patty pan’road culture of the 1980s?

There is value in restraint, not for its own sake, but for the building of character and for the service of the common good.

‘The mentality that proposes this kind of scheme follows naturally from the sentiments and conduct of the young persons earlier described.

It is the ultimate ‘run wid it’ – politically popular, but socially and economically disastrous.’