Good morning, Barbados. Miss Violet addresses you this Sunday morning from the parish of St. Michael, where I have already attended first service and am preparing myself for a proper Sunday lunch with the usual discipline that the occasion deserves.

I have read the papers. I wish to speak to three matters, in the order of their importance.

On the national mental health crisis among our children

The Barbados Union of Teachers has reported that forty percent of calls to the national mental health line come from children and teenagers. Forty. Percent. I want every adult in this country to read that figure and then close their eyes and consider what it means.

It means that two out of every five citizens reaching out in distress are not yet old enough to vote. It means that the distress is not, or not primarily, about jobs, mortgages, or marriages — the ordinary distresses of adulthood — but about school, loneliness, family conflict, the scale of the adult world as it presses down on young shoulders. It means that the institutions responsible for protecting the mental wellbeing of our children have failed at scale, and are continuing to fail.

This is a moral crisis, and I use the word precisely. When a society’s children call a crisis line at this rate, the society has broken something that should not be broken. It does not matter which party governs. It does not matter what the debt-to-GDP ratio is. It does not matter whether tourism arrivals are up or down. A country that is not taking care of its children is not a functioning country.

I am therefore not interested, at this moment, in announcements about Student TV initiatives or new programmes with new acronyms. I am interested in school counsellors. Every primary school. Every secondary school. Trained, qualified, available, present. I am interested in after-school care for children whose families cannot provide it. I am interested in evening programmes for teenagers with nowhere productive to go. I am interested in parent education so that parents know how to recognise the signs of depression, anxiety, and self-harm in their own households.

These are not new ideas. They are the ideas that have been discussed at every teachers’ conference, every ministerial press briefing, every parliamentary committee hearing for the last ten years. They require resources that have been allocated to lesser priorities. They require political will that has been expended on softer announcements.

I call on the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health to convene, this week, a joint working group on child mental health, with a six-month timeline to deliver concrete, costed, implementable recommendations to Parliament. I call on every parent, every grandparent, every guardian to attend to the young people in your own household with a renewed attention. Ask them how they are. Listen when they answer. Do not be satisfied with “fine.”

Our children are asking for help. Forty percent of them are asking through the only channel they believe is available. Let us make more channels available. Let us make them shorter. Let us make them staffed.

On the return of Cohobblopot

I note with considerable pleasure that Culture Minister Shane Archer has announced the return of Cohobblopot to the Crop Over calendar. This is an excellent decision.

For those of our younger readers who have not experienced Cohobblopot, permit me to describe what you have been missing. Cohobblopot was, in its prime, the most distinctive cultural product of the Barbadian Crop Over season — a fusion performance combining calypso, tuk band, drama, dance, and costume in an extravaganza that set the emotional tone for the entire festival. It was not a mere concert. It was a statement about who we are as a cultural nation.

Its absence has been felt. A generation has grown to adulthood with a diminished Crop Over experience. Its return is correct. I congratulate the Minister and the cultural officers who have worked to bring it back, and I look forward to seeing how the revival handles the responsibility of honouring the tradition while speaking to a contemporary audience.

Cultural continuity is not a luxury. It is the thread by which a small nation maintains its identity in a globalised world that is otherwise indifferent to whether we exist or not. Barbados must remain distinctively Barbadian, and that requires institutions like Cohobblopot that carry our cultural vocabulary forward.

On the matter of motorists approaching junctions

Road safety advocates have, again, this week, had to remind Barbadian drivers to proceed with caution at junctions. I will be brief about this because the matter has been addressed before, and the addressing of it does not appear to be taking effect.

A junction is a place of mutual responsibility. You slow. You look. You signal. You yield where the rules require yielding. You do not assume the other driver sees you. You do not assume the motorcycle is not in your blind spot. You do not race through the yellow. You do not text while negotiating the roundabout.

This is not complicated. It is not new. It is the driving instruction every one of you received in order to obtain your licence. The fact that fatal collisions continue to occur at junctions is not a failure of the rules; it is a failure of discipline.

I call upon every driver in Barbados to recover the discipline that was supposed to be the cost of your licence. Your life, and the lives of the other motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians around you, depend on your choices in the three seconds before a junction. Make the correct choices. Consistently. Every time.

In closing

This Sunday finds Barbados in a position of partial progress and partial failure. Cohobblopot returning is a cultural triumph. Our children calling a crisis line at forty percent is a moral failure. The road safety record is a failure of national discipline. The Fitch warning on fiscal pressures is a reminder of external fragility.

Let us do better. Not as a slogan, but as a daily practice. Take care of your children. Drive carefully. Attend the cultural institutions that make us who we are. Call your mother. Go to church.

Barbados deserves the Barbados we are capable of being.

— Miss Violet