Letter of the day - Time for law-abiding Jamaicans to wake up
published: Sunday | November 24, 2002
THE EDITOR, Sir:
THE LETTER in your November 20 publication entitled "Goodbye Jamaica", literally brought tears to my eyes, because it validated what every hard-working Jamaican both at home and abroad is so fearful of, the negative economic and social impact that the ongoing, uncontrollable crime condition in our homeland will cause to our future as a nation and as a people.
It further saddens me to see that in our ineffective attempts to solve this problem we have relegated ourselves to employing a strategy that considers negotiating with the very elements of our society that represent or personify this evil "the dons". How do we expect the outside world to take us seriously when we resort to discussions with the criminal elements of our society as a means to resolve crime? We have literally sent the "fox into the hen house" even though we know that he is the one that has been eating the chickens.
Jamaicans, one and all, it's time for us to wake up, this is not a problem for the Government alone to solve, this is one that will require the collective effort of every decent, law-abiding Jamaican. I love my country and I hate to see it go down this path of socio-economic destruction.
