‘SPEND less, give more”. That was the focus of a talking point programme on CNN last week that encouraged a spirit of sharing at this joyful season that traditionally involve more than Christendom in the celebration of the birth of Mary’s boy child–The Redemeer!

The CNN program may have been an appropriate reminder, if not a gentle rebuke, to those – not only in America – who equate the Christmas season as a time of frivolous expenditure without showing any concern for the less fortunate, the poor and deprived.

With so many people in our own Caribbean region struggling to survive, even before being affected by the spreading plague of a financial and economic crisis that originated in the USA, it seems insensitive to simply engage in the traditional ‘Merry Christmas’ greetings.

My intention here is not to spoil anyone’s Christmas – not that I can. Rather, to express a personal wish that for Christmas 2010, the agony etched on the faces of so many across our region will not be there, because the worse of the global money crisis would have passed – or at least significantly diminished.

Apart from Haiti, the worse case scenario of abject, soul-wrenching poverty in our Caribbean, in no other CARICOM state are the cries of sufferers as perhaps as agonising this Christmas than those of a good many of Jamaicans living on the edge.

With Jamaica back in the clutches of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from which it apparently never fully recovered from an agreement first negotiated by a People’s National Party government of the now late Michael Manley, the cries have been mounting against the regressive taxation announced to coincide with a new accord with the IMF.

As PNP leader Portia Simpson-Miller sounded the bell to mobilise street demonstrations, and the poor kept calculating the misery of rising cost of living – now to include salt, cooking oil, bread, sardines, ground provisions, eggs and sugar, Prime Minister Bruce Golding was ready to show his readiness to remove their burden.

In an example of matured leadership, Golding chose against confrontation with the political opposition and to ignore inevitable claims of succumbing to “popular pressure”.

He did, instead, what’s so often rare in our Community -announce a suspension of the proposed new range of general consumption tax (GCT), scheduled to take effect next month. and to find alternative means of raising US$40 million that’s desperately needed and linked to preparation for the IMF aid package of US$1.2 Billion.

The opposition PNP did well in arousing passions for protest. Now, in the spirit of political maturity at this season of goodwill, it should consider reaching out to the Golding administration in the quest for bipartisan cooperation in the best interest of the Jamaican people.

Much is at stake and the politics of confrontation should give way to reconciliation. Let peace and goodwill trump raw party politics and keep the lid on violence that could only breed more suffering for anguished sufferers.
(Courtesy yesterday’s Barbados Weekend Nation)