So glad its over, but have we learnt anything?

I am typically a political animal, but this election has sent me into hibernation.  After months of vile, degrading, clawing and fang bearing, personal attacks, burning of constituency offices and hissing on soapboxes on every street corner, I have disengaged.  These campaigns have been venomous and ugly.  Did we not learn anything from the eloquence and the humility shown by Obama in his lengthy campaign?  From his refusal to react to slander, his abstinence from delivering personal attacks, even when merited…  Did we not learn from the Obama campaign that dreams can be fostered through politics?  That issues are the fabric of elections.  Something Obama has clawed back since becoming President, after eight years of substance deprivation.  Clearly not, because we’ve just accepted that our political parties released manifestos less than two weeks prior to polling day, and we have engaged with the mud throwing.  Both parties have spent from seemingly bottomless bank accounts during a global recession to ensure you and I see candidate’s faces at three metre intervals along all main roads running through a constituency.  The UPP posters even light up under headlights.  Beautiful.  A lot more beautiful than the walls of Gray’s Farm Primary School in the Prime Minister’s constituency which haven’t seen a lick of paint since we last had a working public library.  I have been to better kept schools made of mud walls in rural Africa.

Still, both parties find it perfectly acceptable to drown Gray’s Farm with sound-clashes of senseless propaganda during an evening when a small collection of women are coming together to think about what they can do about HIV and AIDS in their community.  How much has been spent and wasted in this election campaign and how much difference could we have made to the lives of our most vulnerable with it?  More cars for the underpaid police force that struggles to get to homes of rape victims or the robbed in the middle of the night; more psychologists for the most marginalized with mental health problems.   If we cared about such issues, rather than our duty-free x, or coloured t-shirts, we might have demanded a copy of each party’s manifesto long ago and then read it and pondered it, and asked critical questions of it.  But it’s ok, Buju and Shaggy came!  These big international artists must have been paid well to fly in and endorse a party in a democratic process they have no stake in.  I know at least one band that flew back to Jamaica in first class. 

I’d like to believe that after years of this overt bribery we are savvy to our vote being brought.  But maybe we still whorishly sell our votes, mimicking our government’s actions with UN ballots, making important decisions based on which global power will give greatest capital regardless of the economic and political independence that relinquishes, and the external pressures it exposes us to.  It seems unlikely that we will ever know how much Buju got paid or where the money came from, because we have no solid legislation which requires declaration of political financiers.

Is there anything good that can be taken from these election campaigns?  What has simultaneously impressed and confused me has been the high level of members’ involvement in these past months.  For weeks, men and women have been piling into the backs of pick up trucks, putting up tents, knocking on doors, and generally appearing very active citizens.  Probably they were brought, paid to do this.  I’d like to think not, and that perhaps this level of engagement has been borne out of a genuine desire to effect change.  Maybe we listened to Obama when he said, ‘Yes we can!’ 

 Now imagine a few of these pick-up trucks filled with benevolent hands and minds taking to the beaches every weekend to collect rubbish, or taking to the street to befriend our many disenfranchised young people hanging on street corners and stabbing each other in their spare time, or taking paintbrushes to the walls of a school in one of our poorest communities.  I would like to believe this collective energy, displayed by members of both parties, can be maintained after the election and translated into community based involvement, and used for tackling community issues in a way our current politicians will never do.  The kids or teachers who traipse to Gray’s Farm School every day wouldn’t care what colour the walls were painted, red or blue, but we’ve all forgotten them in these bitter campaigns.  Let’s take something positive from this election – non-partisan community energy, and put it to good use.

Advertisement