I say 'Amen!' to Peter Espeut's column on morality (Friday, July 10). We love to talk about "our integrity" in the upper echelons of Jamaica but have no problem promoting vileness as long as we can make money off Jamaica's back. Integrity, then, is just a word; it has no value. Certainly not the value of being integrated, word-with-deed, deed-with-character. Integrity is who we are, not what we want people to think of us.

We demand 'respec' without holding ourselves accountable to being respectable. Yes, sir! Jamaica is certainly on the wrong road to keeping our independence as a nation.

President Barack Obama has given us a way out as he presents a moral agenda for dealing with the United States. The sheer weight of his family life should make many of our Jamaican leaders in the public and private sector cringe as they see his love for his family in action. But after they cringe, they should apologise to this country, to their wives or husbands and children, humble themselves, ask for forgiveness and move on.

World peace

Leadership is nothing if it is not moral. It was Mother Theresa in responding to a query about world peace who responded: " ... Go home and love your families."

From that perspective, we have hardly had much besides 'nothing leadership' in Jamaica since 1962, and no amount of national honours will endow an immoral leader with moral leadership. Our so-called private lives have public consequences. Hence, prime ministers and ministers of government whose family lives are in disarray, or who simply have none, and heads of companies and organisations who beat their spouses and carry on extra-marital affairs, simply cannot make sound decisions.

Can we not just decide what kind of country we want to live in and determine what will build it and do it? Or have we already decided and are building a moral pariah nation? No country can be built on the shifting ground of immorality. Sooner, rather than later, it will become an unproductive laughing stock to the world - fit for take over.

I am, etc.,

YVONNE O. COKE

yvonne_coke@hotmail.com

Kingston 5