With many issues being reported on with frothy, breathless enthusiasm across the media and turgid discourse being treated as serious analysis, it is often difficult not to conclude that, in Jamaica, ignorance and naivety are travelling companions and mischief is directing traffic.
Whether it is debating the state of education, social dysfunction or economic malaise, a Jamaican Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep 35, 20 or 15 years ago, could arise from his slumber and resume a conversation with his neighbour with the words "As we were saying ... ".
Thirty to 35 years ago, the national anxiety was palpable. How should we treat with the majority of our 11 and 12-year-olds who were required to move from the primary level to secondary education? Among the arguments then was that the Common Entrance Examination (CEE) perpetuated a class bias. It was posited that more than 90 per cent of children who attended private prep schools got placed in the preferred high schools and that even where primary school students had 'passed' the CEE, because there was not enough space to accommodate them, they were shunted to the less than desirable secondary schools.
Poking fun at 'new high schools'
When the Seaga administration took tentative steps to upgrade some of the secondary schools in the 1980s, Michael Manley made sport of him on his pre-election campaign stumps in the summer of 1988. From Morant Bay to Falmouth, he poked fun at the idea of 'new high schools' having no science labs and for whom the concept of purchasing reagents or Bunsen burners was a strange proposition.
Lo and behold, the administration formed by his party over the next 18 plus years perpetuated and extended the policy of upgrading, with the additional fillip of a name change and design in the entrance exam to secondary schools, but little tangible support to make them effective institutions providing the desired better quality education. And so in 2009, we are still lamenting over what must be done with the majority of our 11 and 12 year olds destined for 'riff-raff high schools'.
If Cassandra of Greek mythological fame were looking at 'The Good Ship Jamaica' sailing across the Caribbean Sea she would be screaming "Warning! Warning! Danger ahead", yet being frustrated in the knowledge that despite her prophetic foresight she had been cursed by Apollo to be ignored.
In the discussions about ways to pull the economy out of the doldrums, the analyses of an insensitive International Monetary Fund, its stringent conditionalities and unclear 'alternative paths' have resurfaced as they did circa 1978-80 and again in the mid-1980s. Little attention is paid to the hard decisions that must be taken in the stewardship of the country and the critical steps that must be taken collectively so as not to keep making the same journey around the same mountain. But then, why should we? Did not our well-informed analysts tell us repeatedly over these past two decades that "the economy was on the right track" - never mind that our productive capacity and output were in decline and debt soaring?
Enjoying the fruit of other's labours
With so few insisting on necessary austerity measures, we enjoy the fruit of other people's labours - our streets are choked with the latest model vehicles, we build multiple storey mansions on the hillsides, the supermarkets provide a wonderful variety of imported items and we construct super highways ostensibly as markers of our development and investment in infrastructure.
Meantime, private business bellyaches for more incentives and farmers struggle to get their produce to markets over rutted roadways.
It is folly to expect to reap economic success in the absence of a national commitment to a disciplined way of life or where we spend lavishly on imported consumer goods without earning our way sufficiently to pay for them. And it really matters very little whether the Government or Opposition loves the poor more - for before long everybody will be in the same boat, adrift at sea and cursing our fate.
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