Opposition Leader Offers to Join With PM to Address Issue of Family Life

Opposition Leader, Bruce Golding, offered to join hands with Prime Minister, Portia Simpson Miller to address the issue of family life and the restoration of traditional values.
“We have experienced over decades a cancerous kind of social decay in which traditional values and norms are being destroyed and new paradigms have emerged which have no value structure, no mutuality and are not anchored to a sense of community. It is not unassociated with poverty, but it cannot be attributed wholly to poverty,” Mr. Golding said, during his contribution to the 2007/08 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives.
He lamented that the family had departed from an environment grounded in the home and reinforced by the church, school and the community.
“Many of them don’t know the difference between right and wrong. They were never socialized that way. And therefore, as concerned as we must be, we cannot be surprised to see the vicious manifestation of this social decay. It is reflected in our chronic lack of responsibility, our refusal to take responsibility for ourselves, let alone our home or community,” Mr. Golding said.
He argued that the society could not ignore the threat to social order and that this had to be confronted.
“The response that is required of us today will require mobilization of the people and the organizations to which they relate. But it can’t be a ‘those people’ effort, because it is no longer, if it ever was, a ‘those people’ problem. In essence, we will have to take hold of the many different societies and weave them into one society, in which we each have an equal stake, where no group needs to feel alienated by the other,” Mr. Golding said.