Ashamed of success?

March 10, 2004

This is a phenomenon that has been existing around us for some time, but which we are only now beginning to recognise. For sure, it was alien to our generation.

We, the 10-year-olds, or thereabout, of 1956, grew up, motivated by the politics of the time, anxious to get ahead and ready to boldly surmount all the challenges before us.

You see, "massa day was done" and we understood that we had to shoulder responsibility for ourselves and our country. Seating on little homemade benches and chairs in Woodford Square, we certainly did not comprehend all that we heard there, then, but there was a certain spirit that prevailed which we imbibed to the hilt.

By 1962 with the coming of Independence, we were the teenagers in college, who were not afraid of anyone or anything. There was a popular saying: "...We good-looking, bright and we could fight..." We were too full of pride to beg for anything or to accept anything willy-nilly from any Tom, Dick and Harry. We were too filled of a sense of self-importance, a kind of self-righteous dignity, to steal or take what did not belong to us.

Nobody could give us anything, nor hang anything before our noses like carrot before horses and so lead us astray. We were poor and polite, but contented and quite self-assured within our huge families and by extension our communities.

And, most of all, we had our dreams of success in the future as defined by the philosophy of the movement that rallied us.

The college bells were the sounds of our salvation for education was the passport to take us to another level of existence as we built on what our parents created by their hard work and sweat.

Now it is the turn of our children and suddenly we are discovering that they have not bought into the process at all. For some reason they have not logged-on to the platform of success that has been set for them. Besides being turned–off from it, many of them seem even to be ashamed of the success of their parents.

My very first inkling of this phenomenon came some years ago when a friend from Pashley Street, Laventille, came back to Trinidad from Canada on a scholarship to do a Master's degree in international relations at UWI, St Augustine, and that individual for some reason never wished his home friends and night-club friends to ever know that he was studying, so he never dressed as UWI students would and he found all kinds of elaborate ways to hide the books that he carried when on his way to and from the campus.

In discussion he explained that he never wanted to seem to be more than what his friends were, he simply did not wish to stand out.

At that time we all thought this to be some sort of a unique psychological hang-up that would remain peculiar to that individual and could never become widespread. How wrong we were!

Throughout T&T today, there are students, particularly young males, who possess the talent to be quite successful academically but are deliberately shirking this path so as not to be deemed different to the lot that comprise the common denominator of non-performers. Now this is a whole new ball game.

Previously the value was to be an outstanding individual, today the value is exactly the opposite. The value today is to be undistinguished, to be just another of the common herd. It is the predominance of a sub-culture that is not about exceptional excellence.

It first became noticeable with fashion. The youths of our generation were also quite fashion conscious, as this one is. However, the difference is that in our case while everyone sought to wear what was fashionable, everyone at the same time sought to exhibit some individual distinction. Today there is no individual, creative expression of what is fashionable because everyone aspires to a "sickening sameness," as we said elsewhere.

That reduction of everything to the most common factor is the prevailing cultural tendency of this globalised world. The young males of T&T are today refraining from being exceptional in order to be acceptable to the culture of the herd.

One friend of ours indicates that his son refused to invite classmates to their home because the son did not want the classmates to see the home as a symbol of success and wealth and thereafter reject him from the accepted circle of "sufferers."

So whereas youths of our generation were probably the very first of the "college boys" to relate to the brothers on the blocks, the unemployed gangs, and to join the various steelbands, in fact the very first to be viewed as "college-boy bad-johns," the focus was to attain professional academic qualifications so as to be able to pull "the brothers on the blocks" upwards in life. Today the focus is to stay among them and to stay at the level of their natural comfort zone.

Success in the international sub-culture is expressed in terms of drugs, brands, hip-hop/rap music, guns and violence and the likes of 50 Cents, the late Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG.

When "Yellows," a young bandit of Barataria, was shot and killed some years ago, we were astound by the amount of schoolgirls in uniform who turned up for the funeral. That indeed was a sign of things to come.

Success in this context is about money, rank and crude power over others, it is about "brands" and "cribs" (ie fancy house) but never about "family" and about "a home." It is this kind of pandering to the lowest level that could drive an intelligent youth like young Ms Townsend to such an unfortunate end.

Why are the youths of today not proud of the success of their parents and seem not to want to emulate their parents?

In the '60s and '70s there was guiding philosophy and ideology that described a different world organised around a whole new system of relationships between people. The youths then logged-on and joined the struggles for civil and political rights, fairplay and equality. Today no such philosophy, no such ideology radiates amongst the youths. What then can we expect?