Janiel McEwan | Everyone is waiting

The problem is never hard to find. It announces itself every morning.

In the road that has been patched and repatched until it resembles an apology rather than a solution.

In the office where nothing works unless someone knows someone.

In the meeting where everyone agrees, nods, and leaves exactly as they arrived.

We live surrounded by unfinished business.

What makes this moment dangerous is not ignorance. It is familiarity. We know what is wrong. We can recite it fluently. We have grown eloquent about dysfunction. What we lack is not awareness, but ownership. Responsibility has become a floating concept, passed from hand to hand, never held long enough to change anything.

Everyone is waiting.

Government waits on citizens to comply, to be patient, to be better behaved. Citizens wait on government to act boldly, decisively, cleanly. Parents wait on schools. Schools wait on homes. Churches wait on politics. Businesses wait on policy. Young people wait on opportunity. And opportunity waits on courage.

In this waiting, urgency dies quietly.

Public officials often explain paralysis with language that sounds reasonable. Constraints. Process. Capacity. History. These words are not lies, but they are not answers either. Systems do not stall on their own. They stall when pressure is absent and consequences are negotiable. No institution drifts into irrelevance without permission.

Citizens, meanwhile, speak the language of accountability while practicing the habits of exemption. We condemn corruption, but excuse convenience. We demand fairness, but resist scrutiny. We want institutions to function properly while contributing daily to their dysfunction. This contradiction is rarely confronted, yet it sits at the center of our collective frustration.

From an economic perspective, waiting is not neutral. It is costly. Delay is inflationary. Neglect compounds. Inefficiency behaves like interest, quietly growing until it consumes more than the original failure ever did. Lost time drains productivity, trust, and competitiveness more effectively than any single fiscal shock. A country that hesitates too long eventually pays twice. Once in money, and again in morale.

Many of our most persistent crises survive not because solutions are unknown, but because responsibility is diluted. Everyone agrees something must be done, but no one wants to be first. The cost is too visible. The backlash too immediate. So leadership becomes cautious, and followership becomes comfortable. The system remains intact, but improvement is indefinitely postponed.

This is where reform efforts often falter. We behave as though better laws alone will rescue us. As though legislation can compensate for indifference. But no policy can function in a culture where responsibility is optional. No reform survives where ownership is absent. Institutions do not exist above society. They reflect what people are willing to tolerate, excuse, or normalize.

There is also a moral erosion that statistics cannot measure. When individuals stop seeing themselves as participants in public outcomes, cynicism replaces agency. Complaining feels safer than contributing. Observing feels easier than intervening. Over time, disengagement masquerades as realism, and apathy learns to sound intelligent.

The result is a quiet illusion. Everyone believes they are trapped inside a broken system, while that same system is sustained by collective inaction. We become spectators in our own decline, convinced the problem belongs to someone else.

History suggests that meaningful change never begins with consensus. It begins when waiting becomes unbearable. When someone accepts responsibility before permission. When action replaces commentary. Progress has never been born from perfect conditions. It emerges when hesitation finally costs more than movement.

No leader can save a society unwilling to confront itself. No government can outwork a culture of deferral. Systems do not fail alone. They fail with cooperation.

So the real question is not whether leadership is weak or institutions are broken.

The question is simpler, and far more unsettling.

At what point did we all decide to wait for someone else to fix what we are still willing to live with?

- Janiel McEwan is an Economic Consultant. Email feedback to janielmcewan17@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com