THE EDITOR, Sir:
AREN'T WE tired of getting up every morning hearing the same news on our television and radio 'two killed in a drive by shooting'.
It scares me that the majority of our population is not dying of old age or sickness but by guns, even guns being issued in our communities, where drug dons fight about owning turf.
If we ran a survey and asked those same dons and gunmen who are fighting over turf to give some history of what they know about Jamaica you would discover that they know nothing of our rich heritage of what our forefathers had to go through to get this little piece of land we call home.
I wish we could go back to the days of Marcus Garvey and learn of the things that our forefathers had to go through so we could have this paradise we call home and see if we could appreciate more of this land we love.
Bob Marley, one our greats, sang of "black survivors", for we have been surviving every tribulation thrown at us by standing as one together but at the end we turn at each other and stab each other in the back. I wish I could have been living in the days when peace and love was the order of the day.
February is Black History Month and I don't think we realize how far we have come. Bob Marley asked us to "emancipate our selves from mental slavery", but yet we still have not. I wish we could take the one month that society has granted us for blacks to try and understand who we are, where we are going and what we want our future generations to learn from us. Spanish Town behaviour is just one example to show us that we have not yet come out of slavery, we have broken the shackles physically, but not mentally. Give us back the Jamaica we all know and love.
I am, etc.,
SHELLY-ANN THOMAS
