In democracies as vibrantly emotional as ours, where political nouns and adjectives are more prevalent than verbs, the tendency to engage the lips before the brain seems more instinctive than not. To safeguard against malicious and irresponsible utterances, especially among the political directorate, politicians should develop the habit of counting to 10 before they say things that could be deleterious, not only to themselves, but also to the country and citizenry. Simply put, “Loose lips sink ships.”

Loose lips sink ships because one never knows who is going to hear what one says or how they will use what they hear. While the objective may be to prove who is the better platform “tracer”, loose talk from the political platform may become everlasting albatrosses [conjure the image of large web-footed seabirds and webs of nasty curse] the weight from which would be too heavy to carry.

Of late, there have been quite a bit of loose talk inside and outside Gordon House — the seat of our Parliament. Worse yet, with the expectations of general election, some politicians and wannabe ministers have been extremely prolific at manufacturing and spewing truckloads of verbal manure. Sadly, they are offloading the verbal toxins in copious quantities without evaluating the potential harm to Jamaica, land we love. We all have a stake in this little piece of rock; Labourites and Comrades alike. Therefore, the nationalistic imperative of citizenship should impel every one of us, regardless of political persuasion, to reject the “loose talk” and bad-mouthing of Jamaica in the name of political opportunism. Loose lips sink ships.

Just ask the former Minister of Health Dr Fenton Ferguson. His now infamous “not babies in the real sense” remark not only earned him the ire of a disappointed populace, but the utterance may land him in the political “never-never land”. The unfortunate comments made him into a punching bag for many — and deservedly so. If only he could turn back the hands of time, perhaps he would have engaged greater emotional intelligence and better choice of words. One can only hope that Maas Fergie gets into the habit of counting to 100 before engaging the lips, because ninety-nine and a half won’t do.

Dr Ferguson’s bewildering verbal transgressions aside, and before anyone accuses me of initiating restrictions on freedom of speech, let me state unequivocally that censorship is not the objective. However, there is a particular purity in discouraging “loose talk” that this article endeavours to promote because we should not overlook the fact that loose talk can undermine rational thinking, to such an extent that it could even abolish the practice that defence on the sea begins on the shore.

Loose lips sink ships, and it appears the election ship of the People’s National Party (PNP) has begun to lose propulsion. For instance, when Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller took to the stage at the PNP’s 77th conference in September, fired up her base, and drew from Philip Bliss’s battle hymn, “Ho! My comrades, see the signal; waving in the sky…victory, victory is nigh…,” it must have dawned on her that she was sending a signal to the country that elections were nigh. She allowed her loose lips to push the PNP ship adrift and into uncharted waters. As party president, she must have known that the PNP was not in a position to face the electorate until some time next year.

Still, she allowed expectations of early elections to take root in the minds of the people, only now to outdo that performance with the introduction of a new crazy game she calls “master’s touch”. It is fair game to speculate about the consequences of an inappropriate touch by “the master” since the master is a mystery. What if the master touches her in a manner inconsistent with her expectations; will she cry foul or await another touch? See, Portia, loose lips sink ships.

The PNP has pushed itself into a corner from which it may never emerge electorally. The election anxieties are all over the place, with private sector planning and activities at grave disadvantage. If the master decides not to touch you until March 5, 2017, is that when you would call the election? Better yet, what if the “master touches” you tomorrow, would you then call the election, knowing that the risks for your party far outweigh the opportunities? Jamaicans must unanimously reject this silliness about waiting until the “master touches” Portia to call elections. I now willingly concede and accept a suggestion from an e-mail friend (Courtney) that it is better to have fixed dates for both general and parochial elections.

So, loose lips sink ships inasmuch as the words from the lips can create unnecessary tension and confusion.

The “four things that come not back” idiom could not be any more deliberate than putting “the spoken word” first in the sequence of the “four things”. For, although it may be expedient to issue apologies for things said, in jest or in anger, sometimes apologies are not sufficient to repair the damage already done to a person’s reputation or a nation’s character. There are those who take great liberty at impugning motives and bringing people’s character into disrepute for the sake of doing so, because they believe no one is hearing or listening. Strangely, my grandmother was wont to say, “Boy, if you want to know who your friends are, just play drunk and lay down a’ roadside…” The moral equivalent of her advice is simple: What soberness conceals, drunkenness reveals, one way or another.

There are no excuses for some of the things — malignantly naive and sadly bigoted — that some politicians (and ordinary folks too) say, especially when they are on the “political hustings”. They say things, just to appear tough, visionary, smart, or matter-of-factly. They often cannibalise their own message, destroy their brand, and devalue their worth without having the faintest idea of the width or depth of the ditch they are digging for themselves, as well as for those who follow or support their nonsense.

Opposition Leader Andrew Holness and his spokesman on finance, Audley Shaw, must begin to accept that words matter; hence “loose lips sink ships”. Shaw, for instance, cannot allow sour grapes to cause him to employ loose lips ahead of rationality. He, more than any other politician, knows that the multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank are merely lending institutions. He knows that these institutions have absolutely no vested political interest in the outcome of Jamaica’s election, and as such they do not operate as a political arm of any government. For purely partisan reasons, Shaw may not like that the economic numbers are looking very positive, but it is not in Jamaica’s best interest for him to impugn motives in the name of political malevolence. As Jamaicans, we must stoutly reject such irresponsible loose talk. The Planning Institute of Jamaica, last Thursday, reported that the economy expanded by 1.5 per cent in the July to September quarter. This is excellent news that all Jamaicans of every political stripe should celebrate and praise instead of concocting poppycock theories.

Opposition Leader Andrew Holness’s rather rabid ‘loose lips’ comments about people being more likely to die from crime and violence when the PNP is in power than when the JLP holds power did not help the process of depoliticising the issues or fight against crime and violence. He should consult with his party chairman, Bobby Montague. Montague recently beseeched the central executive body of the JLP to take health, education and crime off the political platform. Neither did Holness’s rather puerile “no fish round here…” remark — and his lame attempts at explaining what he meant — assist the process of cultivating tolerance and promoting equal rights and justice, as his party’s own anthem so proudly prescribes.

The fact that we could not conceivably belong to the same political party, the same socio-economic strata, share the same religious or sexual interests makes it inevitable that, beyond all the obvious differences, we are still Jamaicans. Therefore, no political party affiliation should become mightier than the power of our common heritage or emerge more precious than the sacredness of citizenship. For, if we are Jamaicans first, then we must not allow anyone to convince us to join the crusade to destroy our country. It matters not that our political antecedents compel a great many of us to follow the politics and voting behaviour of their forbears, even so, we can and must honour our collective consciences by doing what is reasonable and right. Loose talk is not a virtue, it is a vice.