The Editor, Sir:
The women of Jamaica could march until the cows come home against crime and violence. They could trample every pavement until it cracks and crumbles beneath their hoofs. These marches will amount to nothing but another side show starred by women.
If my sisters and others of the female species really want to be taken seriously, they should turn around, get back inside the one-room shack or the million-dollar mansion and let their first order of duty begin with the purging of their own household. Mothers and grandmothers must stop shielding their criminal sons. Sisters must stop fencing weapons for their brothers, and women in general must turn their backs on men who commit crimes and indulge in a life of criminality.
Women need to get back to the good old days when there was no place in their beds for a criminal man, when mothers would be the first to make public their son's criminal ways and daughters who chose to sleep with a wayward man would have to do so under any other roof but mom's.
Those of my generation and beyond will remember that not so long ago, it was the women who ran things. Bad men were loners and had no abiding place. Rude boys had a hard time getting a date as no female in her mind wanted to be seen in the company of an old criminal.
It is the women of the society who changed this. Nowadays, every murder the men commit, the women add another okra to his steam fish; the more crime he does, the more wood root and moss he gets; and the more young girls he rapes, and murders, the more nice names he's called such as 'Putus, Plummy, Sweetness and so on'.
So, ladies if you want to do something about crime and violence, don't march away from it - 'Nuh sankey nuh sing so'. You nurtured, nourished and reared the beast, now it has turned into a monster you want to just get up and march off and leave it. This can't be your final answer, or is it?
I am etc.,
D. ANTHONY WILLIAMS
dawilly@optonline.net
Via Go-Jamaica
