THE story told by Ambassador Audrey Marks to St Mary High School graduates recently should be recommended reading for our young people.

It’s the kind of story that, hopefully, will provide vulnerable youngsters with the strength and integrity to resist the get-rich-quick temptation that is so often thrown at them.

Ambassador Marks told the graduating class that during her years working at Air Jamaica she started travelling to the United States, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean and Canada, taking Jamaican rum which she sold in an effort to supplement her income.

After a year, she said, the business started thriving to the point where, because she was seen so often by Customs officers, she would be “mostly just waved through”.

The temptation to smuggle drugs, she said, came from a relative who noticed how quickly she exited the airport.

After her initial shock at the suggestion, Ambassador Marks admitted that she thought of what she could do with the volume of money she was told she could earn from getting involved in that illegal activity.

But the more she thought about it was the more her mind turned against the idea. For, as she told the St Mary High youngsters, “it was a battle of the value system I was raised with and the desire to have easy riches”.

Her career goals, she said, were far more important than quick money.

That, we hold, is a powerful message for young people coming from a successful businesswoman who has also served her country in one of the highest posts in the foreign service — Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States.

For, if Ms Marks had any blemish, no matter how small, on her record, there was no way that she would have been allowed to serve in that post.

While her address was delivered to students leaving St Mary High School, it bears relevance to youngsters across Jamaica.

“Times are difficult,” she said, “and you may be approached, but getting involved in any form of illegality — stealing, scamming, drug-running, gunrunning, to even the simplest form of wrong activity — is contrary to giving yourself the opportunity to live out your most audacious self without fear or favour.”

Too often we have seen in this country youngsters who adopt the wrong value systems mainly because they are influenced by adults who really should know better but who themselves are warped in their thinking.

But a lot of the bad decisions made by young people could easily have been avoided by good parenting.

We acknowledge that parenting is not an easy job. However, people who have children need to accept that they have a responsibility to instil in them good values, and that it is also their job to mould them into responsible citizens.

For those parents who find that task difficult, the State has programmes that can help them. So they have no excuse.

Ambassador Marks’s parents obviously did a good job of raising her, and they should be commended for it. But the ambassador also deserves our praise for not only refusing to yield to the temptation placed before her many years ago, but for sharing her story in the hope that it will change the minds of those who might be going astray.