After the chaos, what is next?

THE EDITOR, Sir:

How did a black baby boy that someone loved enough to name 'Dudus' - a term of endearment - come to be almost as infamous as Osama Bin Laden? I do not know the answer, but I have some suspicion that Dudus is a symbol of a society gone wrong, and if we become too focused upon him, we will miss the bigger issue.

He will be caught, or he will go down like Rhygin, Sandokhan and George Flash, or even his daddy, Jim Brown. But the big question is, after that, what? Will the guns cease to bark in sleepy rural towns like Falmouth where young black men are dropping each other like cornfield scarecrows? Will it stop the YouTube videos of men flying off sound boxes like ninjas and landing upon the heads of girls lying in baby bath pans waiting for the daggering? Will the arrest of Dudus save one little girl from being taken away in a taxi cab only to be found raped, strangled and thrown away like a used condom?

the natural product

I do not pretend to know all the answers about how my beloved Jamaica has become the murder capital of the world, however, I believe that the fruit is the natural product of a seed that has been watered and fed, even if inadvertently.

I am a child of the '70s and a product of Michael Manley's socialism experiment. That experiment saw whole segments of my rural district move from working poor to solid middle-class status. Whatever else was wrong with his experiment, I know for a fact that many of us who were destined for the cane fields and domestic work saw a once-unima-gined future open up for us because we got a chance to enter some high schools that were once reserved for brown people and a handful of token blacks whose parents had the contacts to get them through the doors of these prestigious institutions.

I remember being told as a high-school student about the importance of self-reliance and the importance of reducing our dependency on imports. We sang festival songs with words like "Ah fe we country, com mek we big it up."

Lord knows, I am now almost 50 years old and hindsight has shown me the serpent in the garden of socialism. However, in the 1970s when the gun violence started in earnest, most of us still had a sense that we had a stake in Jamaica.

We have become the most murderous nation outside of a war zone and our crass worship of bling, bashment and badness has led us downhill on an okra slide meeting a banana peel, and if we don't change our dirty ways, we will go like Port Royal of old. We have to find a way to tell the truth to ourselves. Politicians, leaders of civil and business organisations who mix up 'sake a craven' have to take stock of the blighted future we are leaving for our children. The clean-up must be on a personal, as well as a national level.

Finally, Mr Orrette Bruce Golding, if you really love Jamaica, you need to step down. You have disqualified yourself and no amount of apologising can make it right. What you did was not the result of a mistake or a fault. You have no good options open before you because the whole world has witnessed your duplicity. If you stubbornly refuse to do what is right, you will cause Jamaica harm, because no civilised nation will take us seriously as long as you remain our leader.

In closing, I appeal to Jamaicans, my own people. Let us go back to our first and best works. Let us remember that we are our brother's keeper. Let us remember when old people were respected, men did not use expletives in front of women, and children were taught to love God, respect their elders and work hard in school. People who do business, transact all enterprise fairly and honestly, and if you employ others, pay them fairly. They will be less inclined to come back and rob you if you deal with them justly.

prejudice

Those who administer the law should do so without prejudice, and those who police our communities must seek to build relationships with those you serve. Do not share in the spoils of wrongdoing. Do not take bribes, and do not accept the spoils of illicit trade and theft.

Politicians should stop the practice of handing out contracts to party henchmen, and they must distance themselves from the dons and don daddas who have stepped in to fill the gaps left by the real fathers who have abandoned their children. We need coalition leaders who will take on the task of dismantling the garrisons and put the people through a process of re-education and job training so that they will have new thinking about themselves.

We need a new kind of leader who will inspire the populace to believe in something greater than the acquisition of goods and the power of the gun. At the rate at which we are going, we will self-destruct if we do not change course.

I am, etc.,

Sylvia Gilfillian

Jamaican living abroad