A LETTER writer to The Gleaner last Friday made some startling comparisons between murder casualties in Jamaica and deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict against the size of the respective populations. When the numbers killed are adjusted to population size, more than twice as many people have died by violence in Jamaica than in the active conflict in the Middle East over the last two years!
Since we published the names of the 960 murder victims from the official records on Friday, December 6, the number has passed the 1,000 mark and yesterday stood at 1,024.
This is a strange country. Our letter writer, Joseph Gottfried, has found it such a beautiful and interesting place that he has been vacationing here for 47 years and, despite the crime problem, keeps coming back.
But as another eventful year winds to its close, despite our problems we are not among the worst off. As we wrestle with a growing budget deficit and debt burden, the once prosperous, model Argentine economy has all but imploded. Venezuela, the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, is crippled by a protracted national strike and civil unrest with fuel and food shortages. More than half of Zimbabwe's 14 million people are now short of food, with starvation looming in what until recently was one of the more stable and prosperous countries in sub-Saharan Africa having one of the highest literacy rates.
We have had flooding and rain damage this year, but not on the scale of Sri Lanka where floods last week have forced 100,000 families from their homes. In fact, some of our cases of flooding have provided local tourist attractions and windfall incomes for the enterprising people of these areas!
More money than ever before is in circulation for Christmas spending. Over against Dr. Davies' troubles with the formal economy, a recent study has estimated that the vigorous informal economy of legal goods and services, and not counting the criminal component, is contributing 43.5 per cent of GDP. One of the big problems of Christmas now is to find parking in the plazas for the exploding numbers of motor cars that Jamaicans now own.
The season, ideally should allow time for reflection, gratitude and sharing. Things could be better; but things could also be much worse. Our problems are not beyond our collective capacity to find solutions. And we have reasons to be thankful at this time.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
