Mark Wignall | Pragmatic on prostitutes

There are not many people socially and economically brave like well-known Montego Bay businesswoman Janet Silvera, who has expressed the view that she would be in favour of government funding being used to establish a designated area for prostitutes in the western city.

“It is a fact that the women who service the strip at nights will always be there. We can’t leave them out of the equation, they are an integral part of the strip,” she said.

Montego Bay is music to Caribbean tourism, and as alluring as Ocho Rios and Negril and Portland are in the Jamaican tourism lexicon, the very mention of Montego Bay is enough to sway the first-time visitor to only one definition of paradise in Jamaica.

Prostitution and politics are professions that have existed side by side for many centuries. And they share many of the same features. The first feature is that they have to abide by the great acceptance that hypocrisy is their saviour.

There are more than a few women living outside of St James who trek to its capital, Montego Bay, weekly to sell their sexual favours. They do it mostly to support the raising of their children. But in the communities where they live, they do not exactly walk around and advertise that they are in the business of selling sex. The silence and the pretence are the hypocritical functions.

The politician may be in the ‘business’ of preying on underage girls and in beating them up in broad daylight. The hypocrisy is in always drawing for the God card. But since we have made the ultimate space for the ultimate hypocrite among us – the politician – it should only be fair that we accommodate the profession that sells sex: the prostitute.

UNDER PRESSURE ON ENTERTAINMENT

The tourism industry in Jamaica has made a fantastic recovery, and it has done so mostly without much fanfare. Those of us who understand the power relationships in Jamaica always knew that the powerful tourism interests and lobby on local soil would always have that extra clout to lean on the Government and have its way while other sectors in lockdown would be forced to wait in COVID-19 times.

The entertainment sector was its own worst enemy. Too widely scattered and poorly represented in any cohesive voice, all the entertainment sector had to do was take a glance of the Jamaica Hotel & Tourist Association. It is also a fact that many of those in the entertainment sector only exist as long as the last promotion existed.

So a dance is held, money is made, and the next promotion is launched when the first money is exhausted. One suspects that the PM’s attempts to bring more freedom to the smaller entertainment sector must have come about because the Jamaica Labour Party could no longer deal with the fact that many more of our ‘small’ people were involved. During the great unknown periods of COVID from March 2020 to now, it was the accepted norm that large sectors of our people had to be placed on lockdown.

The PM has now decided that not only is more freedom desired, but the political argument can longer bear the scrutiny of the social and economic pressures.

It seems to me that this idea of herd immunity was not too well researched by the medical experts among us. According to that theory, if 60 per cent of a population is vaccinated, then much fewer would be contracting the disease, and the spread would, in short time, be minimal to insignificant.

It has been shown that in certain sectors where normal protocols are strictly adhered to (the tourism sectoral example) the positivity rates dwindle to less that one per cent. It would seem, therefore that human behaviour can affect spread just as much as high rates of vaccination. Probably even more.

UNPREDICTABILITY OF JAMAICA

The reader wrote in an exchange of emails between us, “The degree of unpredictability is too heightened in all areas of life, making it difficult to live a normal life.”

Last September, as some of you will remember, I was shot (in the arm). A few weeks ago, three of us gathered and exchanged titbits about the shooting. One man, in his mid- 70s, was badly shot in his midsection. He showed me the stitches from his groin up past his navel. He spent four months in the hospital.

A young man in his 40s was badly shot in his feet and now walks with special attachments to one foot. He spent four days in the Kingston Public Hospital. I spent just about half a day at the University hospital.

Is this normal? Certainly not. But what should we do apart from joke about it? We laugh now because I can still remember the elderly man in the seat behind me with his scary, low moans. At that time I did not even know that part of his insides were hanging out of his belly.

Is this normal? Certainly not.

WHAT IS WITH LAMBERT BROWN?

Senator Lambert Brown has absolutely no idea that his mouth has hardly even been in synch with what obtains above it.

A little over one week ago, some Jamaicans in a small boat ran into part of a jetty in Miami. One of the Jamaicans told American security operatives that there was no life in Jamaica. He gave the impression that Jamaicans were being shot down in the streets.

As much as I came close to death last September, once I heard that man talk on the American airwaves, I sensed something inauthentic about it. As it turned out, the man was a bit of a semi-don in an inner city community with national attachments to the People’s National Party.

And the senator did not know enough about that to keep his mouth shut? And that is what he used in an attempt to criticise the Government about its crime-fighting inabilities?

I know we have problems, but, Mr Brown … .

- Mark Wignall is a political and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.