We are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade and looking back we can easily see many things that were wrong with that shameful period. This makes us want to fix those old problems, but we can’t as they have already happened and there is nothing we can do to reverse what has already happened.
We can however influence what happens in the future and the challenge is to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we can fix the future before it happens.
This raises the question, what mistakes are we making today? For what will our future historians blame us? Slavery existed for a long time before the community accepted it was wrong. Similarly, there are probably several things that we are doing today that we think are OK, but which will be judged as wrong by future generations.
Perspectives change and we can expect that in, say one hundred years time, Barbadians will have a different outlook on life. When they look back they may recoil in horror at some of the things we are currently doing. Meanwhile, from today’s perspective we have difficulty identifying what those things are, because we are doing the things that we are “accustomed” to doing. We should challenge ourselves to figure out what those things are and start the correction process.
Several possibilities come immediately to mind; capital punishment, punishment in general, not doing enough against AIDS, creating too large a public debt, not preparing for high energy costs, not responding fast enough to global warming. All of these are possibilities, but I want to stick with the issue of slavery and its aftereffects.
We do not like to talk about the wrong things we do. That takes a great effort and it is much easier to keep quiet. Self-examination is very difficult for us, perhaps because we expect to find a “sinner” when we look at ourselves and so refuse to take the exam. We can feel the fear tugging at us, turning us away from this self-examination and we very easily find ways to avoid doing it.
This could be why we are so secretive and value “privacy” so highly. The report on our self-examination on a national scale has not been published. Something is restraining this. Could it be that one of Bob Marley’s “mental chains” is wrapped around this report?
This secrecy is a social characteristic and could be one of the legacies of slavery. It has many side effects. One of these is a lack of trust. When you know very little about the people around you the tendency is to be suspicious. In this atmosphere of suspicion the only stories that are accepted as true are those that depict people as thieves or criminals. This has the effect of perpetuating a negative self-image that reinforces the distrust.
There are echoes here of the scene in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree. This suggests that we have to take a more fundamental step and work on our predisposition to hide and judge and blame.
Transparency is one way out of this trap, but if the public attacks whoever releases information, we cannot expect many people to volunteer to do this. Instead of living in the light of information we seem to end up living in the dark where we can more easily avoid responsibilities.
The Churches should be able to lead an initiative to take us into the light of transparency. It is an opportunity for them to re-establishing their leadership in spiritual matters. The upcoming election will be an opportunity for them to show leadership, but will they take it? Avoidance of leadership is another characteristic that seems to have its roots in oppression.
If we are going to propel Barbados into developed nation status, we need to get everyone working on this project. The Churches need to make a significant contribution. Perhaps they should also look back to see what they have done wrong and then move forward on a principled basis.
Failure in this mission is a serious contender for criticism from our future historians.
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