Our own worst enemy

Debbie Jacob
Debbie Jacob

THE FUNNY thing is (and I don’t mean ha-ha) that we like to paint ourselves as happy-go-lucky, fun-loving people. We have even convinced ourselves that Carnival brings out the joy in us. We dance and prance and wine and grind and chip and pretend that this is true happiness.

Meanwhile the newspaper headlines tell a different story. A seething anger surfaces every day in this country, and it doesn’t take a break for Carnival. Unspeakable violence has defined at least three of my recent Carnivals.

I have stopped pretending that these are happy times and just try to barricade myself in my house and hide from the vibe until Carnival passes. But the anger and the violence just keep rolling through the streets like one of those big trucks blaring inane musical commands at Carnival.

It’s not that I’m aspiring to be cynical here. I just feel it’s dangerous to don feathered costumes and play ostriches hiding our heads in the sand. This is not a happy country anymore. Sure we do the best we can, stealing snippets of joy where we can find it, but we all have been touched, one way or the other, by the anger and the violence that consume this country.

Press pause for a minute here or turn the radio down and ask yourself one question. Why do anger and violence prevail? My bet is that you can’t answer that. For the most part, people are content conjuring up their own brand of anger as a response to the stories of murder and mayhem they read in the paper.

Far too many people find solace in blaming the Government for our problems. Righteous indignation is getting us nowhere in this war on crime. (At this point, I think it is safe to categorise it as a war.)

Even in my 11 years of working in the prison I am still struggling to understand the violence; still refining my thinking about it.

I know for certain that much of it comes from marginalising a certain segment of society. We do that by offering an irrelevant education that doesn’t meet the needs of those on the lower socio-economic rung of society.

Ask any of those experts who study crime and they will tell you our problems stem from the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Carnival sure isn’t filling that gap. It’s feeding disparity with its overpriced costumes. Poor people can’t afford to pretend there is no anger by joining a Carnival band.

Anger and violence don’t come out of a vacuum. They are a response to circumstances around us, and what most people have seen are decades of government mismanagement and government squandering money that should have gone into bridging the divide between the rich and the poor in some meaningful manner. DEWD or CEPEP or any of the many acronyms in-between that really accomplished little more than feeding the dangerous and false notion of entitlement that prevails in this country. It robbed people of real creativity – the type to create jobs – and fed that insatiable feeling of entitlement that defines us.

Rich or poor, we are all equal in that misguided feeling of entitlement that prevails from way back when a certain esteemed political leader told us “money is no problem.”

So, since money was no problem, government created those embarrassing and demeaning CEPEP jobs where 15 people do two people’s work of cutting grass at the side of the road. The many evolutions of CEPEP have succeeded in killing productivity. They have smothered certain professions that create a sense of entrepreneurship, independence and creativity.

Who aspires to be a gardener when they could make the same amount of money working a couple of hours for CEPEP? Likewise, fewer women work as housekeepers. Ironically, initiatives like CEPEP make many people feel that certain jobs – like housekeeping – are beneath them. CEPEP has made losers out of all of us.

The housekeepers we once had brought important values into middle and upper class homes. They bridged the gap between the haves and have-nots and forced us to feel some kind of connection.

Now, without these housekeepers who once served as an anchor in our homes so we couldn’t drift away from the problems of this country, we lose touch with their world. We have lost the stability these women once gave our children.

Meanwhile, our anger festers. There’s no chance anything will improve until we seek many answers for the question why? But talk is cheap and gets us nowhere. We can no longer afford the luxury of waiting for the Government to solve our problems. We all need to seek answers and then take action. At the end of the day, we are our own worst enemy.

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"Our own worst enemy"

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