I have sinned.
Some people would say that I need to find a church and seek prayer for my transgression: last week I provided some wrong information about the situation in St Kitts. It is not, as I wrote, 20 months that Parliament has not met (it seems that it was, at that time of writing, more like six – which is bad enough).
The 20 relates to the number of months the majority of members of the Parliament have been unable to have their motion of no-confidence in the prime minister tabled.
Forgive me.
Question, though: What defence, in the name of democracy, can be advanced for not putting a submitted motion of no-confidence on the Order Paper of a parliament with the utmost urgency?
But talking about church . . . .
High among the nominations for the award for Most Pathetic Thing must be the not infrequent calls here for the church to do more to save the society – by those essentially in charge of ensuring the discipline of said society.
From time to time, as dangerous youngsters give us pause, those in the seats of power make this appeal.
An appeal to an entity that, as far as we should have been able to tell in this “Christian” society, has its own peculiar mission, not of directly saving the society as such – which is probably a vain hope – but of helping people to save themselves from the society and to “season” it (being “in the world but not of the world”).
The plea takes no account of the fact that the church, by calling those who would be “saved” from a life of “sin”, is already doing a great deal to reduce the very behaviours that have the leaders so desperate.
It is incontrovertible that the masses of the “saved” that the church has plucked from the “world” are not generally those killing fellow teenagers; in possession of illegal firearms; engaging in brazen theft, addictive drug use, cyberbullying and other cyber-irresponsibility, public disturbance, vandalism, teenage sexual recklessness; and displaying a troubling dismissiveness concerning formerly cherished values.
Sometimes in our judgemental zeal to locate and pillory hypocrites and charlatans among its ranks, we don’t give the church its due.
What the powers that be seem to want to do, while not holding fast, firm and unyieldingly to their own foundational mandate to create social order and discipline, is to palm off the responsibility on other groups that have their own specific marching orders.
Apparently, these leaders can’t come down from their lofty work in finance and economics, health, education, tourism, commerce, international business to take care of social discipline as their prime overarching duty – they want others, with their own differently focused agenda, to do what they should do.
And if you have the Attorney General – the country’s chief law officer – merely begging people to stop burning “stuff” and the Minister of Transport and Works majoring on uniforms for workers in a PSV sector that entrenches scofflawry, you know that they are sending the message that vital help is not on the way from the appropriate quarters.
Yuh know what as well? I don’t think they are asking the church for more “religious” activity (Bible study, prayer meetings, baptisms, missionary crusades, preaching of repentance and salvation and so on).
Oh no: the church, which gets no props for the contribution of such things to less disturbing criminality and social deviance, is supposed to do other things that are more pleasing in the sight of leading men – even though it may thus miss what it understands to be its calling – through which it still manages, whatever its faults, to make a better contribution than most in the area of social order.
Must other groups whose missions are not specific to reducing sexual promiscuity or killing or stealing and so on and blocking the tributaries thereto, also be turned to those ends, while evidence is scarce that Government is passionately pursuing them?
Although we need all the help we can get, the authorities really must let entities that have their own distinct agenda get on with their business while Government ardently looks to its elemental task.
And while we are at it, let us allow the Soroptimists and the Optimists and the unions and the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross and the National Organisation of Women to attend to their specific missions without being tugged at by the powers that be to do what the very powers are failing to do.
Now, I am not saying that the church cannot do more even as it pursues its particular interpretation of its mission. But I do feel that instead of seeking to essentially redirect such a body, our leaders should pay more attention to their own derelictions in example and policy in the area of social discipline and to crafting approaches that have far-reaching potential to reduce – we will never eliminate – the more disturbing (often criminal) expressions of disrespect for others.
There are approaches, the large-scale reach of which only Government can engineer, that can be implemented to increase our chances at social order.
Clearly, no panaceas exist – no society that I know of has ever been able to eradicate the vilest turns of the human mind in relation to the life and property and peace of others.
But some have managed to generally hold offences to at least a level and incidence that do not have citizens constantly living in fear of the young or abjectly despairing about their humanity – which is where, if you embrace the present consternation, we seem to be.
An area of proven positive influence – and quite interestingly one in which our wandering-eyed Government leaders can exercise wide-ranging initiative – is broad-based school involvement in community service.
Instead of making speeches that are mostly vexatious rants, the Minister of Education should be piloting such a policy and more. Why is it that some of our leaders talk to us more as exasperated windbags than as the policy deliverers they are supposed to be?
Our progress would be immeasurably helped if those in charge of the order and discipline of the society – Government politicians – would stop looking around for surrogates and man up to their overarching and potent role.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.
