THIS IS the first day of the last month of a year of historical events too tentative to call as the best of times, the worst yet - or somewhere in between.Because it is December the focus will sharpen in anticipation of the impending Christmas season. But even this traditional shift in mood and expectation cannot erase the dark clouds of fear and apprehension about so many murders and other crimes.
Perhaps the supreme irony of 2002 as a General Election year was that relatively benign polling was followed by so much communal enmity and seemingly wanton killings.
With nearly a thousand killed in violence thus far there is no shortage of analysis and prescriptions to stem the rot. The range of solutions, from advocacy of countervailing force to firm action while preserving civil rights, is itself indicative of the dilemma.
But this has to be addressed when the Prime Minister speaks to the nation tonight. Few people, we suspect, would opt for the draconian imposition of a State of Emergency, certainly not with the international impact that would imply; in particular, the impending winter tourist season due to start later in the month.
A recurring theme in many 'solutions' is that the people themselves must want to halt the carnage. That presupposes a national consensus at many levels. Politically, there is now balanced representation in Parliament which while it may enrich debate does not guarantee consensus, not if policy positions are poles apart.
Consensus in business, certainly at the level of industrial relations, has given recent signs of a resurgence of trade union militancy - as the JPSCo impasse seems to indicate.
Perhaps the most fundamental divide is the class gulf which separates the inner-city communities from the rest - the classical haves and have-nots or Two Jamaicas.
Another category of consensus - at the level of punditry and academic analysis - is that the crime and violence derives mainly from this social divide. But a striking and ominous note declares that the masterminds are well endowed, the brains of the organised mayhem.
Herein lies the major challenge of a modernised Police Force which must shed more than a century of outworn methodology.
There is no honeymoon for the historic fourth term of the Patterson Administration. They should tell the nation where we must stand between the worst and the best of these times.
