The microscope: “Let there be love or not”
Hi my friends, how have you been since my last column? I pray you are well and in the best of health to benefit from your hard work earned wealth. I want to talk about love this week. Yes, why not? My zodiac is the twin male and female (Gemini). When I sat at my workstation, my more delicate side wanted to pen something about love. Yeah! Let’s pen about love today. Let’s talk about love and as bad as we think things are today, people still love and will love till the sun falls from the sky. As I settle down to speak to a time when I remember, a time when the local talk was “Jamaica no problem, ah oh so mellow” I’m thinking that the past was always better and one would get the feel that smiles were brighter and this space called Jamaica seemed gentler. The good mornings and hellos from the people we met in the streets had so much warmth and appeared genuinely happy to greet each other. And when someone died, even if it was not from an illness that person would be in a ripe old age. I want to use this week to talk love – not romantic love. That has its place and is reflected in music and poetry speaking of commitment and adoration, not reasons to be between the sheets. This love that I want to address is this overwhelming and constant bombardment that draws my attention to the happening of today’s love affair with death and murder ‘Homicides, and Suicide. – Yes! Suicide- well what would you call all the car accidents that claimed lives? This is my point exactly. But as my mind wrestles between love and hate, because of the recent crime stats of Jamaica I shudder to think there has been a long struggle with crime and violence since the resistance to slavery.
Justice to kill or just beautiful things
I have said in my previous chat here that the crime levels will create a time when the public will be unmoved. When the security forces act and their killing is justified due to crime levels. On the other hand, this is supposed to be a story about love, people being in love. Boy meets girl, the walking hand in hand across busy streets, stopping for a while to hug and smile, cuddling getting her face powder on his white t-shirt. I think all that has been replaced by the Zoom room and secondly who wants to be strolling down the road to be held up at gunpoint and robbed of valuables including one’s cell phone. And what songs do a young man and I dare say the youthful 50s and over age group engage in to express their affections to their heartthrob? Is it one that his girl reminds him of his jeep or that he wants to sex her up? Compare this to yesterday years’ songs that had tunes that sang of two persons – male and female, standing in support of each other through good and bad times. Today when he or she doesn’t have their way someone dies and most times it is the female. So though I want to talk of the sweet and beautiful things that love brings, there is the reality that over 1,000 persons have been murdered by the gun and an equal amount shot but did not die. This seems worst to me than an old karate movie where hundreds are slain –dead bodies everywhere after the kicking and punching. This makes me wonder? Who buried all the dead? But that’s a movie so the dead gets up and walks away and people get paid.
Love and Executive Decision
Can love resolve the current state of affairs in Jamaica? Another year is closing fast where over two thousand persons were shot and with half the amount dead. Who grieves the loss? Who gets paid for the loss? My guess is as good as yours. Thus, is there order on the cards by the government and private sector? Will the public outcry on crime and violence be satisfied by the security forces excesses? From where I sit on a low, looking up on high (no not high on anything that alters the mood) I see unhappy people filled with hurt and praying, still trying to smile through all the pain, still expressing from their lips ‘One love’ but could be waltzing with decisions that seek to address crime, violence and dissatisfactions too numerous to mention here. The words, “Executive Decision,” mean decisions made at the highest level. It relates to a person or group of people or branch of people, branch of government, empowered and required to administer law and order. And the law is a social engineering tool, its effect is to get people to behave in a specified way supported by force. Okay, I guess I’ll have to write a follow-up column unearthing the love I intended when I began writing this week’s column. However, l am wedded to the idea love will find its way undisrupted.
David R. Muhammad is a former morning host on Visions Television and a former member of the Palace Amusement Media Movie Review Committee. He is currently the Student Protocol Officer of the Nation of Islam’ study group – Jamaica.
