On the 31st of May, 2007, Walls Bookstore closed their doors for the last time. For decades, Walls has stood as an iconic monument of the facade of Fort Street and as a testimony to people’s desire to inform and educate themselves. Unfortunately though, it has to be asked whether many will notice its passing or indeed miss it. One need only to glance at the newspaper headlines or merely take a stroll down any road to know that the current agent of socialization in our culture is not the refining influence of books, but the mostly negative influence of North America.

This has been noted often and loudly as people try to find some scapegoat for the rapid and egregious decline of our social standards. It is accepted wisdom that our children and youth have inculcated values that are foreign to our own. However, after at least a decade of this reasoning without any improvement in the public discourse, it is time to interrogate this premise.

Our youth are not in the thrall of some foreign power. In fact, children and youth are the least responsible for the state of the society that they inherit. For example, youth are responsible for an alarming amount of crimes involving firearms, but they are most certainly not importing, buying or selling them. Youth are not responsible for the burgeoning pornographic industry that has recently come to light. They are not responsible for the entrenched drug culture in our country, as is evidenced by recent large confiscations of both cocaine and marijuana.

The fact is that youth are most often the victims of crime. Who can measure the corrupting influence of being exposed to criminal behaviour during the most impressionable period of life? It has been suggested in a myriad of studies that a significant risk factor in the descent into criminality is the premature experience of being a victim. It bodes extremely poorly for today’s children and youth to be raised in an environment where exposure to pornography and the drug culture is a part of their formative experience.

Walls sold mostly textbooks with only a few novels for children and adults; rarely could one purchase works of poetry, prose and non-fiction. It often frustrated me as a child that the selection was so small, but at least it was there as a prominent beacon of learning. Since returning from study abroad, where I was able to take full advantage of large and extensive bookstores, I have been even more frustrated at being unable to find my favourite titles, but at least there was somewhere to look. Now there isn’t, and we need to ask how many Kittitian children have a favourite storybook bought at Walls; how many were taken there to select one as a gift?

Books are not mere things; they are an effective and wonderful window into entirely different worlds that only travel can compare with. They improve and challenge the mind, develop skills of critical thinking, expand the vocabulary and sharpen one’s diction. How many Kittitian children have read Cambridge by Kittitian Caryl Phillips, Green Days by the River by Trinidadian Michael Anthony, or In the Castle of My Skin by Bajan George Lamming? These are the narratives of our lives, a codification of the rich oral tradition handed down from African griots that connects us to our past, enabling us to share our present and to memorialise our hopes for the future.

As a confirmed bibliophile, I cannot understand why everyone does not rush to feast at the inordinately rich banquet that is literature. It is hard to imagine that Walls would be closing if book sales were brisk. It is equally hard to imagine that children weaned on The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, the verdant poetry of Jamaican James Berry, or of Nobel Peace prize winner, Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, would be so easily susceptible to the poison of Get Rich or Die Trying by rapper 50 Cents. In my opinion, his very name is a true estimate of the worth of his music.

There is no doubt that the current tastes and practices of our youth are a direct result of what they are being taught by our adult society; either deliberately or by omission. Youth are merely a mirror through which a society is reflected and the ugly picture we are seeing is our own. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be able to correct it. We can tell that the most consistent observation made by the youth of our society contains exactly the rampant materialism and violence that they mimic. It is these pathologies of adult society that are the cancer in our culture which must be addressed before there is any hope of remediation for our youth. Remediation for our youth has become that much harder with the closure of Walls, now that it is even more difficult to find or refer to a good book to occupy and absorb their minds as an alternative to the negative, explicit content of video games, music, videos, television and movies.

Children are not deceived by the vociferous protests of the amount of television they watch or the content of those shows. Many may even laugh at it, knowing that they watch these shows either with their parents or with the knowledge of their parents. Many parents don’t even monitor or censor the types of shows their children watch. These same parents are unlikely to buy books for their children to read. Many even refuse to purchase textbooks, claiming that the Government has already done so with the SELF-program. They then stand idly by as those same SELF books are abused. Both as a student and as a teacher, I observed the shameful way in which SELF books were treated; they were left in school, put into the garbage, torn and defaced, and parents glibly said that since they did not own them it was not their concern.

Today, many children have cellular phones. Yet, the same parents who will not buy books for their children, sees fit to equip them with the latest technology, to say nothing of apparel and footwear. Why is this?

How can some vague concept of television influence be blamed for the specific and continuous economic and social decisions of so many parents? It has been said that a person’s bank statement is the most accurate description of his priorities. As such, it is clear that books and learning are not priorities of a majority of parents. How then can children and youth be any different? How can they be blamed for the lifestyle choices of their parents and society at large? The time has come to prevent the further alienation of youth through constant censure and criticism and to stem the tide of their self destruction by confronting the real culprit, the unconscionable hypocrisy of their elders!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 6:07 pm and is filed under lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.