THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT SEEMS remiss to me that a people such as ours, privy to as dynamic a history as ours, would be so slow, if not loath, to learn from it. I speak with reference to the recent Flankers saga and one of its particularly distressing episodes. Given the extensive disruption of life in the community in question (made all the more jarring when considering that Canterbury only last week provided a foreboding dress rehearsal), and given that two now affirmed innocent people were killed, one could not help but be taken aback by the comments of the Opposition member for tourism, Edmund Bartlett, as aired on the televised evening news of Monday, October 27, 2003.
One would have thought that there would have been some mention made of the acute social problems that have manifested themselves in the form of the disturbances of the week. One may even have been so forward as to expect some condolences extended to the families that have been affected. The contrary was to be heard, a sadly lame attempt at an economic prognosis of the deleterious impact of the demonstrations on the tourism industry. And thus, our need to lament the fact that our nation has again demonstrated its retention of the
post-Columbian legacy of misappropriating its priorities.
The Iberian conquistadors brought here by Columbus plundered the country for what little it had to offer a foreign empire (to the demise of its native inhabitants). The English and French profiteers, privateers and pirates, and the consequent slave system that they spawned, repeated the cycle of exploitation of the island's resources for foreign powers (again to the demise of its inhabitants). And now, as if in the next phase of this cyclic journey, a new order seems to see it as more important to supply the best of our country's offerings to cater to the needs of primarily foreign interests with little regard to the plight of its inhabitants.
While I have no peculiar grouse against tourism, I am forced to ask: Why must we continue to relegate our own people to second class citizenry? Why does Dr. Peter Phillips announce that more trained police will be concentrated in Montego Bay, Negril and Ocho Rios (interestingly, all of which are tourist resort areas) and thus imply that the majority of our people, decent, law-abiding Jamaicans, are to be approached from the standpoint of only being able to operate in response to brute force and fear. Another comfortably accepted legacy of slavery? Have we gone so far away from any semblance of civic pride and national consciousness that our main reactionary response to such problems as advertised by Flankers must covertly be aimed at guarding an industry tailor-made to serve others and not our own?
Indeed, it may quite possibly need Cuba to open up its doors and sufficiently shock the remaining Caribbean tourism economies such as Jamaica's for us to recognise that we need to have some remote amount of respect for our people. At any rate, how much are we to be pitied for falling prey to the nauseatingly clichéd reality of being doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, rather than learn from them!
I am, etc.,
ONEIL SIMPSON
UWI, Mona
