We Are Throwing Pebbles at Aircraft Carriers!
Jamaica is a country of superlatives and proud grandeur but our greatness in international track and music cannot mask our new disgraceful norm.
We write ad infinitum, we talk ad nauseam, we cry, preach and beseech but to what end? While we celebrate national pride, brutality, murders and rape continue. Whole or one half of families are wiped out. Children are brutalized. Laws are wantonly broken; who wants to be shackled by rules of behaviour!
Crude zinc fence shops litter our streets and obstruct motorists’ vision. In The Cayman Islands they know that streets are not to be overtaken by crude unattractive shacks and harassers.
Here, in downtown Kingston, ‘Pay to Park’ is the norm but in Barbados they know that vagrants cannot be allowed to hold citizens to ransom if they wish to park their cars legally on the streets of Bridgetown. Bermuda has the Tynes Bay Waste Treatment Facility.
They manage and control their waste and the public education drive ensures recycling and separation of residential garbage. We have the Riverton Dump where scavengers collect discarded meat for roadside or back door processing and resale.
Our collective country esteem is shattered if we don’t believe we are better and deserve better than this. The poverty and hungry excuse for crime and nastiness insults the majority of our people who struggle every day to make ends meet while keeping their humble homes and environment clean and beautiful.
Those who would have us believe ‘crapola’ must never have been to some rural districts right here in Jamaica and see that humble surroundings do not equate with nastiness. To think otherwise, you must never have stayed in grandma’s home with the shiniest toilet floors decorated with Ginger Lilies. You must never have tasted grandma’s meals of the sweetest tu’n corn meal and the best chicken back to boot with yard fowl egg custard or flan for dessert. Frankly it matters not what humble meal is prepared in many homes across Jamaica. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. There is no wealth requirement for dignity and classiness.
Jamaica used to be the Jewel of the Caribbean but since 1962 we have watched the slide towards anarchy. Our reputation as a murderous, cruel and crass country especially with regard to our more vulnerable citizens is second to none for our size. Government and its agents, churches, private sector, media houses, journalists, analysts and those giving commentary like myself, have all been engaged in what a prominent US journalist calls ‘throwing pebbles at aircraft carriers’. Our ammunition to bring order to our society is a joke and so far amounts to nought! Who are these criminals and vagrants that we should be mindful of? Don’t we outnumber them?
If it takes draconian measures to defeat the beelzebubs, so be it! Haven’t we exhausted inaction and all the softer measures advocated by the criminals’ rights people? Why do we persist in tiptoeing around crooks, vipers and vagabonds? So we can put a dent in the flourishing crime wave, isn’t it time to pump it up and revert to measures that actually work? Let’s focus on rights for the innocent lives taken too soon by preventing more of the same. Let the priority be the rights of all decent, law abiding citizens. All the great things about Jamaica pale if we don’t rid our country of the scourge of murders and abuse. Is there anyone with fortitude left in Jamaica? In this election season, which party will face crime head on? Why did it take the US Ambassador to tell us that crime and violence stifles economic development? I say majority rules; let’s take back Jamaica and do away with those who can only react with a camera crew at the gruesome scenes, give lip service and press releases! Enough!
Sandra M. Taylor Wiggan is a retired army officer, education administrator and Justice of the Peace.