Okay. I am officially scared.
One day before Usain Bolt showed the world how great we can be as a people I was watching the news on TVJ. They had a story about a man who was clearly off his rocker, who jumped from one of the top floors of the Kingston Public Hospital.
There were debates within my household whether TVJ should have shown the clip of the man trying to defy gravity, but that's a very subjective matter. After 9/11 when the world saw people leap to their deaths from 80 storeys up, a man jumping from five storeys is really not an issue, at least not for me.
What concerned me was that some of the people below were urging the man to jump. How low have we really descended when we can gleefully urge someone to jump to possibly their death? Have we become so insensitive, so hardened by our spiralling murder rate, that we have no issues with seeing one more dead body?
Can't defy gravity
As it was, the guy jumped, finding out in no uncertain terms that there is this thing called gravity, but he did not die. As the TVJ cameraman panned down towards the parking lot where the people were standing, it picked up some smiling! The man is lying impaled by metal spikes atop the gate at the hospital and people are smiling, some laughing. I wanted to know what was so funny.
There was nothing funny about it. The report said he might not walk again. What is funny about that?
He is now going to be confined to a wheel chair - if he will be afforded one - and will probably spend the rest of his days being a burden to his family and possibly to the state; someone tell me where is the joke in that?
Sometimes when we do bad things, bad things come back to haunt us. Perhaps over the past 20 years or so we have been doing too many bad things and the crime we are experiencing is the karma we are reaping.
And this scares me.
I don't like the idea that I am living among people who place so little value on life. Sure, I know life has been rough but that is no reason to act like degenerates. We are who we think we are and obviously we have become convinced that we are savages.
Gun play
No wonder we now resort to gun play to settle simple disputes that 25 years ago would be settled over a couple of Red Stripes in a bar. No wonder we harass tourists as if to suggest that they somehow owe us something. No wonder we have become so crass and so devoid of any form of morality. We have become like the Huns.
Last month we killed more than six Jamaicans a day!
Jamaica has always had its poor. Jamaica has always had its people who were born on the wrong side of the tracks. But there was a time when a man did not measure his dignity by what he owned but by the values he held dear. There was a time when we were our brothers' keepers, when law was obeyed and lawbreakers frowned upon.
All that has now been reversed and I am truly afraid that unless we make an effort to change, things can only become darker. And I really don't like the dark.
PS.
I want to use this opportunity to congratulate Usain Bolt for smashing the 100-metre world record last week in New York. I am especially proud because he is from my parish, as is Veronica Campbell-Brown and her husband Omar.
Keep up the good work Usain and may God grant you the strength to go into Beijing and bring home the gold! God knows we could do with the good news.
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