The bungalow, on a knoll in Top Hill, St Elizabeth, looks down at the Caribbean Sea. It is surrounded by verdant flowers and shrubs — different from when I visited in 2012. Its captivating charm conceals a painful past that time has dulled but cannot erase.

For years, the family kept the bloodstains on the wall — a testament to our politics and the harm it visited on them, who mostly stayed away from it. Nine-year-old Garth Bromfield and his seven-year-old cousin, Maurice Stephenson, were killed inside that house on October 18, 1980. They were two of about 750 Jamaicans killed in the period leading up to the October 30 general election.

The boys were members of a large, tightly knit family of community stalwarts. Garth was the sixth child and adored first son for his parents. As told by his sister and cousin, my dear friends, they had all taken refuge under the beds, hiding from the mayhem that had overtaken their property as supporters of the PNP and JLP clashed in the area — influenced by a rally in another town where then Prime Minister Michael Manley was scheduled to speak. A brawler, unrelated to them, ran inside the house. The police threw tear gas canisters inside. Despite their effort, the boys, agitated by the fumes, would not stay down. They were killed when a barrage of police bullets invaded the house.

While my friends, whom I met in my late teens, were mourning their loss, I was growing up in neighbouring Manchester where I learned to be afraid, worried all the time for my father who walked home at nights with just his harmonica and a flashlight. I learned that our safety was the luck of the draw. I learned that the power in the hands of politicians could be used ruthlessly and cruelly in the quest for more power, and I learned that there was nothing to protect us. Events of those years, 1976-1980, represent the height of malfeasance in this country. They cemented the culture of politicians as marauders; directly or through approved surrogates — the dons.

Without an effective ethical reference point or mechanisms to hold them accountable, many politicians still walk around perceived as honourable men. Neither the State, the church, academia, the media, nor any of our self-indulgent institutions have seriously confronted these issues. Some people even have the nerve to be righteously indignant on politicians’ behalf.

For me, it remains an infamous blemish on our country that citizens are being murdered with impunity and that we have not protected our children, physically or psychologically.

We are yet to see the importance of demarcating what is ethical and what is not, except when it suits us to exploit an issue. An ethical person has a highly developed sense of wrong and right. Judging from the many problems we have, ours is an ethically challenged society. I am not saying, of course, that everyone is unethical, or that it is ever possible to have a society where there will not be ethical lapses. Despite what some people read, I do not make such generalisations. I never said, for example, that every wealthy person in Jamaica earned their wealth unfairly, nor am I saying every politician is corrupt. What I will say is that we have severe and widespread problems when it comes to matters of ethics, and I will say further, that the society condones them at the highest level.

The education system has not done enough to train students in what ethical behaviour means and how to make ethical decisions. In fact, the system itself has long been a hotbed of unethical behaviour. Deliberate and systematic differences in the quality of our schools, correlated with specific demography, is an ethical issue. If we are not convinced at the level of process, we should be by the outcome: huge opportunity gaps, and the persistence of a massive underclass — more than a million people below the poverty line. That, in the long run, is harmful to everyone. In matters of conduct, education, in any society, should be a mitigating mechanism. Ours has not been to the extent that it should.

We are learning and growing, but we need to accelerate the pace. In a globalised world, we are in a fishbowl with every action scrutinised and potentially costly mistakes magnified. For all our sakes, the boundaries need to be clearly drawn.

Ethics are about standards of right and wrong; about how we treat each other and about our obligations to society. They are also about virtue, fairness, honesty, compassion, and loyalty. Religion and ethics are not the same; people can be ethical without being religious, and it is not the same as what is sanctioned by law. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University School of Law, New York, explains that while law often embodies ethical principles, law and ethics are not co-extensive. “Many acts that would be widely condemned as unethical are not prohibited by law — lying or betraying the confidence of a friend, for example.” Slavery laws and apartheid laws were unethical, for example.

Politics represents persistent ethical failures for us. We must examine the trajectory to better understand where we are and what we need to do differently. Corruption is not only about misappropriation of State resources, it is about the means used to secure power and how we cheapen and objectify humanity in the process. Routinely, people have called for a truth and reconciliation commission to examine the politics of 1976 to 1980. I am for a truth and justice commission.

For now, we must act decisively on the issues in front of us. We must not undermine the Tivoli Inquiry; let the commission find what it will and let those findings serve as a mirror to reflect and a compass to guide. In the case of the controversial ministerial phone bills, audit all of them –high or low. Ethics in public policy does not allow for arbitrary selection based on whether we like the outcome or not.

Put the framework in place to guide the way forward. Decent political leaders must nurture an ethical environment; establish boundaries, guide policy, and motivate right conduct, but few seem to even have the capacity to recognise this, much less to do anything differently. Until then, the farce goes on.

Grace Virtue, PhD, is a social justice advocate.

CAP:

We are yet to see the importance of demarcating what is ethical and what is not, except when it suits us to exploit an issue.