When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
A downside to being the blogmaster of Barbados Underground is that there the danger of being sucked into the vortex of perpetual negativity that is ever present in our space – to the extent the good that churns around goes unseen and unheard. It took many years for the blogmaster to reconcile this reality. Members of the BU household who manage the blog, we try our best to rise above it, always with difficulty. One of the regrets to overseeing Barbados Underground as the lead in the BU household has been the personal sacrifice. Maybe one day these personal sacrifices can be detailed to incent others who must follow to build and sustain citizen advocacy by the fifth column in Barbados.
Of the 47 official murders logged for 2019 Temario Holder’s tugged at the heart harder than the others. To be honest water wellup in the eyes as the Bajan might describe using the vernacular. Whether it was the fact he had not seen a star pitched yet, that it occurred in broad daylight in a secondary school or perhaps, just perhaps, the perpetrator of the act was of similar age; a minor who also had not seen a star pitched and will have to whither his early years in a penal facility suffering under the weight of his crime .
Many will come here to comment and direct blame at the political directorate. ALL actors in civil society must be held accountable when dysfunction occurs – a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. These behavioural tumours sprouting in the underground ‘organs’ of society mean that they will eventually metastasize to affect us all, we have evidence of it today.
So far the reaction by successive governments to the deteriorating social landscape has been to employ reactive measures mostly of a militaristic design. On the economic front we have aggressively adopted BERT, translated to mean Barbados Economic and Recovery Transformation program. There is the pressing need for the social equivalent by our leadership.
I take you back to Wednesday [Temario’s funeral] because it brought home for me the fact that absence of family is what is at the root of the problems confronting our society…And when we speak of family, my notion of family is one that doesn’t just turn up when things go bad, but family has to be that we are together both in good and bad times…Families [are] supposed to know the strengths and weaknesses of each other.
Minister of Education Santia Bradshaw
We have to understand the changes that have occurred to our family units in the last 50 years and strategise how we will compensate for the vacuum left by the decimation of the extended family, roles played by the parish or village church, social centre and village pasture to single out a few examples. How in a little 2×3 island the personable has morphed to the impersonal!
Temario Holder gone but not forgotten…
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