Ian Boyne, Contributor
IT IS another busy day in the life of a middle class professional. One is juggling assignments, pouring over learned papers on international economic development, finishing yet another speech.
But one Jason has called several times since morning, my secretary informs, so I might as well take the call and dispense with it in a minute or two. But not his one...
"Hello, I am a youth calling you from the ghetto", the voice announces. He had seen the television programme "Profile" where a University of the West Indies lecturer working with ghetto youths was being interviewed and he volunteers to put some flesh and bones to the abstract discussion of poverty and inner-city (ghetto) life.
"Mr. Boyne, why don't Cable and Wireless, JPS and the Water Commission ask you what qualifications you have before taking your money?"
I don't understand.
"But they ask you these things when you go in to get a job."
It's a question of frustration, not stupidity, it would later turn out, for this is an intelligent, articulate young man of 28 on the other end of the line, a voice from the ghetto of hopelessness and despair.
"Mr. Boyne, I am frustrated, depressed. I don't know what else to do. Every door I go to is slammed in my face. Here in the ghetto nobody cares about you. Is society just going to leave us to rot? Am I just a statistic?"
I'm busy but I am forced to listen, with tears more than moistening my eyes. He relates his struggles, deep, intense struggles from Westmoreland to the ghettos of Kingston, primarily in east Kingston. He has not done well academically and so constantly fails to get jobs. He has learned some tailoring.
"But I can show you stocks of pants a have at home that people can't come to collect. It's my baby mother who keep me alive, I feel useless as a man because my woman to be supporting me. Mr. Boyne, you think I want to live like this, have to be totally depending on the little money my woman carry home for me and the baby? Sometimes at night we just look at each other in frustration. How can we continue?"
Broken dreams
I am accustomed to hearing tales of woe, hard-luck-stories - genuine ones, I believe. But Jason's story, perhaps because eloquently and touchingly told, brings forcefully to my mind the many people, filled with hope, aspirations and dreams, who can see no way of fulfilling them. They are not just poor: They are poor, but they nurture. A hope - a strong, resolute hope - that they will one day make meaningful contribution to the wood-pile of life.
"I one day want to do something productive in this society. I don't want any money, Mr. Boyne, I don't want a handout, I just want an opportunity to help myself, to be somebody."
Why doesn't he take to the gun, as others in the ghetto?
"Because I have seen too many of my friends dead. Sometimes you just talk to a man on the football field, go tek a shower and go back to play some more ball and yu see him body on the ground, dead; the man yu just talk to. I see too much of that."
"Though sometimes a feel I rather dead than live this type of life. I know friends in the ghetto who say they will commit suicide by saying something feisty to a policeman whom they know will kill them easily. Some of the police killings is really suicide."
There are many Jason's who woke up to another day of hopelessness this morning. However bright the sun is shining today, it is midnight in their lives. There seem to be no flicker of light.
How will this society contain the frustration, anger and bitterness of its intelligent but poor and dispossessed youth who believe they have a contribution to make by who feel rejected as trash by middle and upper class Jamaicans? What will we do with those who can't migrate? The painful truth is that a change of political party is not enough to readily provide the answer to many of our youth who have already passed through the educational system ill-equipped for 21st century life.
Expendable
Though rarely discussed in the Jamaican media, the fact is that globalisation has relegated many persons to rubbish heap of history. They're expendable - unfit, according to Darwinian theory, and inefficient according to the Washington Consensus.
Thirty-five million people in Europe itself are unemployed. As the Human Development Report 2000 points out, poverty is not just a phenomenon of the South. And many countries which have healthy economic growth rates have a large percentage of poor people.
The state and civil society will have to make a determined effort to rescue and provide hope to the Jasons of this world and this country. The alienation and lack of trust which result from persistent poverty is like a time bomb in this society.
After years of being dehumanised and made invisible by poverty and societal neglect, it is a small wonder that youth are turned into vicious, heartless criminals who will murder brutally. After all, we have not treated them as human beings so why should they behave that way?
The free market, laissez-faire economic philosophy cannot provide us with the framework to deal with the Jasons of this world. While it is true, as the David Dollar and Aart Kraay's influential World Bank paper (Growth is Good for the Poor) shows that pro-growth policies help the poor, this is not automatic. There will be people, large numbers, who will not have the skills or facilities demand by 21st Century capitalism.
What must we do to them? Just forget them? This is the challenge of development. Waiting for big factories to open up in Jamaica is a pipedream as the Jasons can't all be accommodated in IT factories or chemical plants. The NGO community needs to push for a compassionate, caring state and must challenge the economistic philosophy of the three political parties.
