Slackness, Ghetto and Acceptance

A member of my family unit recently decided to relocate due to the unrelenting tensions in the familial home. It was a sad indictment. I found no satisfaction in seeing her leave albeit she would have gladly gloated over my departure. That has always been the difference between the learned and the untutored. The ignorant find amusement in life lessons. I have asked God repeatedly if he sees any errors in my judgement, please reveal them to me because I am only human and to be mortal is to be flawed. 

I thought for the most part that whatever issues we had as a family could have been resolved without this drastic measure. It became clear to me that those without any iota of introspection are liable to commit the same infractions repeatedly. If you cannot look into yourself and see your mistakes then you will be unable to implement any corrective measures to your life. If you cannot see the errors in your ways then you are doomed. 

Sometimes I am embarrassed when I read the comments labelled against Ghetto people, Vybz Kartel and those from lower socio-economical stratum. But in my quiet moments often foddered by recent occurrences I realized that they may be right in some of their contemptuous diatribe.

  Poor, illiterate people are some of the most difficult people to deal with.  Irrationality is the name of their game. They like hearing their own voices than conceding an argument because of what they know is right. It's about scoring points, winning quarrels and defending warped, unsound opinions. They put up with slackness and expect everyone to tolerate their almshouse thinking. In the Ghetto when you have nothing, you have the most friends and the minute you show signs of progress even your own family becomes your arch rivals. Everybody loves you until you become their competition. 

People unwilling to reconcile differences are dangerous sociopaths, who despite the damage  their aberrant behavior engenders find no fault in their destructive behavior will create problems regardless of their location. 

Those who support wrongdoers will surely become their victims. If you fail to tell a loved one when they are wrong then rest assure that you will one day be a victim of their lopsided thinking. Those who partake of slackness will be retributed tenfolds. 

I am not in any position to condemn another human being. Those of us who came from the gutters know that from time to time a piece of us will break off and float back to the floor from whence we came.

  Wealth can gray your eyes at the edges, money does not make you hover above human qualities, you are only a flawed being with much material gain. 

There is nothing that haunts these streets like ignorance and irrationalism.  These streets carry their own rules often quaint to those who live outside the zinc fence and stench of poverty.

I cannot say adequately that I understand the fashion of these rules, I can only imagine that they serve to somewhat moderate the turbulent climate of these streets. It is not within my capacity to cast judgement, I will try my best to understand, resist from condemning but there are notions that I will never accept or condone. 

I respect the artiste but not a criminal

 I don't know if Kartel is going to be acquitted. But one thing I know is he is a talented artiste. As smart as I am I won't hesitate to admit that I AM a  huge Vybz Kartel the Artiste Fan and would very much like to see him free. I interviewed him at sumfest 2010 along with Movado and they were the most humble dudes to me. I've got male families and I know how tough these streets can be so I respect the hustle of every male who use their 

 Game or talent to get out there. Kartel may have corrupt the youths but they supported him because his songs were what they wanted to hear all along. Music celebrating freedom of lifestyle, choice and sexuality.  Kartel is not the music. The music is the society and the society is in the music. 

I won't vouch for whether or not he is a murderer because honestly I don't know the man like that. I speak for Vybz Kartel the Artiste not Adidjah Palmer the man. If he is found guilty of the crime by the verdict of his peers then he should do the time....

None of us is above the law. The law cannot be prejudicial to wealthy people or celebrities. Once the law is broken and we are found guilty then we must serve our sentences. 

Sometimes I think back and wonder why Vybz Kartel was so foolish to begin with to put himself in such a compromising position. It may seem like a conspiracy but  he allowed it to be believable by perpetrating acts that rendered it true. Understanding his fragile position in society and how many ethical pundits blame him for the moral decay of this society, he should have opted to walk a very straight line. 

His incarceration will have a grae impact on Dancehall but the music will live on as the likes of Alkaline , Koshens and I octane will continue to light the torches. I hope Vybz Kartel's parody is a lesson to other celebrities who might feel that they are above the law that Jamaica is working hard to build a level of integrity in its crime fighting struggle. We are living in an era where as we slip  we fall... It pays to live you life on a straight line not filled with doubts and compromising fall outs. 

Jamaican Police Officers need Psychological Evaluation

The Jamaican society is expressing collective disgust for the surging crime rate. We do not insist that the police soften on criminals because criminals rarely if ever express any mercies for their victims. 

We however believe that under the tenets of our democracy and the statutes outlined by our constitution that we would prefer if alleged criminals entered judiciary process and legal processing instead of the hurling of corpse into Van backs. 

The police force in Jamaica do not understand how it affects their image when they commit extrajudicial killings and then the media report claims that it was a police shoot out and citizens on the ground know that it is a blatant lie and affront to the grieving families. 

We also need to bring attention to mental health in Jamaica. Most police officers suffer from post traumatic stress conditions and it maybe responsible for the high levels of verbal abuse and brutalities that they often subject civilians to. 

Many have to face marauding gun men and grisly crime scenes that will alter or compromise their mental conditions. They need a police therapy session to assist them in processing the psychological taxing of occupational stress. The police officer is a human being too. 

The Jamaican Constabulary Force hierarchy must keep in mind that police officers are cut from the same mold of the criminals that they hunt. Our society has a culture of deviance which is evident in the pervasive corruption that exist in all facets of the Jamaican society. 

There should be an ethics vetting and orientation programme for new recruits including essay writing to discover how cops will deal with a particular situation. New recruits are often force to confirm to the culture of archaic policing by commanding officers through buttress or threats. 

We cannot win the war on crime and violence if the civilians hates the police or the police believes he is superior to the citizens. The resentment is building and such a situation will only feed crime not stymie it. 

Respect begets respect Police Officers

I  see the relationship between the police and citizens as a two way street. You respect the civilians and they will respect you. Respect begets more respect so the civilian too must also mindful of how we deal with the police. Gussy's death taught me two things about police. You have good cops ones that held constant dialogues with the community after Gussy was killed and you have bad cops who come and point them gun inna you face and talk bout " who dead dead already and we have nuff more fe kill... Me left mi heart a mi yard"... Now tell me which onlooker, friend or family would not be angered by such an utterance after the killing of someone you knew your entire life. Now people look down on poor people behavior with contempt, but don't witness firsthand the ignominable behavior of members of the security forces. 

This notion that police have to use bad man tactic to get people to cooperate is a myth. The real bad man don't need to bad up people, him just need fe expose him gun and people will cooperate. No one will ever challenged the man with a weapon. 

We cannot have the people who are suppose to be endorsing law and order behaving like common criminals. This is a significant social element why citizens do not respect the police. 

But then you can't blame police in Jamaica because the police and the criminals are shaped from the same mold. The same culture, probably similar upbringings and exposure to a decadent culture. What we end up with is men with license to shoot with a depraved sense of morality. 

I don't understand how police officers can approach people like marauding gun men. The police thinks we live in a criminal state and the citizen believes that they live in a police state. In a criminal state, every citizen is suspected of doing illicit activity and can only be vindicated by the probe of a police officer or the courts. In truth we are all guilty until proven innocent. Which means any one of us can be shot down at anytime and labelled as a criminal with a gun. 

I do not support crime and violence and anyone who knows me know that me no keep bad man friend. I don't even like see them. And people always tell me I should not make my contempt that obvious but I can't help it. It is the nature of my humanity. I despise those who have no regard for human life, bad man or police. 

If you see life's answer to our problems as blood for blood then we will never reach anywhere. We won't get any long standing results. We will breed a nation of people carrying grudges for the death of their family members. 

Kill for kill is not the answer... Never was and never will be. I don't understand how people see death as some form of punishment when we all will die. Death, involuntary change is inevitable. So death within itself is no form of penalty... 

What is really mashing up Jamaica?

I am of the belief that the greatest stymie to the progress of any country is unity and a sense of oneness. We do not have that in Jamaica, we have a sense of segregation and parochialism which is destroying our efforts for nation building. 

I recently passed several police officers after members of the police force murdered my innocent cousin because of his association with criminals they claim. I am rather miffed by this society whose judicial tenets asserts that everyone is innocent until they are proven guilty and yet they killed little Gussy under the premise that he is a gun man when he has never been to prison and don't even have a police record. 

I stopped to speak with the officers and the expression on their faces were automatically aversion and disgust. I quickly realized another factor that we have with our police forces and it is that they think they are separate and different from the rest of the community when in fact it is members of these communities that make up the Jamaica Constabulary Force. 

I was considered a threat because I was not apart of them and without provocation or incite, an umbrage colleague told the officers that were speaking to me with his face grimaced in anger and repulsion to " make me gwaan bout me business" 

I heard Police Officers threatening young men to shoot them. One officer said " who dead, dead already and we have more to kill". I will only assume that they are just trying to intimidate the young men from retaliating in protest for Gussy's death  and they are not threatening arbitrary killing of innocent boys who are peeved about the murder of their friend. 

Police Officers so not offer counseling to the bereaved families instead they assert their authority more on the community which is only fuel to flare up anger and riotous behavior. 

There is a particular group in an adjoining community who I regularly speak with some members and I found it rather disheartening and infuriating that not one of them extended condolences to me for the passing of my kin albeit it is rumored that they themselves are not excluded from injustices. I would have been the first person to extend my heartfelt condolences to them if a member of their team passed away. 

They quickly show me how disunified and unconscionable people can be when injustices are meted out to people who they claim are not apart of their clique. 

What happened in Tivoli Gardena during the Dudus Extradition is a testament to the injustices and police excesses that can happen in these so call "operations" . 

Another grand issue that Jamaicans have  is that we do not learn from our mistakes.  I was recently speaking to some young men who are friends of my slain relative and if you see how them a big up them chest. They have missed the bigger picture altogether. 

These young men nowadays only respect scammers and bad man.  They see intellects like myself as people who might betray them.  They do not value my opinion because the truth is that I do not have money like them so they relegate me to some lowery status in their vacuous minds. 

But these Scammers fail to realize that having money does not make you "smady" in Jamaica. Gussy drove a BMW X5 and was murdered like a dog. Money does not change your social status, it only improves your economical conditions. You are not automatically given clout or reverence because you have money. Gussy's death should be a lesson to all of you basking around in your self made importance. You should all know by know that you really mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. You do not factor on society's radar. Push come to shove, society might decide to get rid of you as you are seen as a liability, a detriment to the advancement of this society. 

The greatest issue  affecting our society is that we need some youth political advisors for our politicians. They do not have a clue what is happening on the ground. We need elected Junior MPs and advisors to ministers under the age of thirty five. 

They would be surprised at what a shadow cabinet of youth politicians can do for this country. It might just be our way forward into the future. We need to try something else instead of these old tactics that are not working. 

Scamming and violence were not born out of "worthless poor people" with depraved characters. The decadence within our society is at all levels. And we on the grounds know that if it was not for scamming providing some money to boost the small rural niche communities. Then we would far more problems that we have now. 

I am of the opinion that God knows exactly what he is doing. I have spoken extensively about the problems that money in the hands of fools can brook. We have evidentiary value from our observations to conclude that these young men have not used their ill gained wealth to the advancement of their communities. 

It is not entirely their fault, it is due to the misconceptions of a parochial culture. Children are socialized to believe that they should pursue upliftment for themselves in order to measure higher on the social continuum alongside their peers. So scamming gives them an opportunity to gain wealth over their peers and this bears fruits of bad mind and violence. And what is the worst disease affecting Jamaica? Bad Mind

Young Gussy's Life should be a Lesson to Us

We as a nation of people are not largely introspective. It is fine time that we begin to look into ourselves and see that the methods that we have been using to fight crime and violence are redundant. The ministry of security must realize that the tactic of murdering criminals have created more social maladies now than it did thirty years ago. We have a fractured justice system and an inept legislative process that often exonerate criminals therefore leaving the police officers with no other choice than to exterminate alleged murderers. 

Innocent people like Gussy get caught up in these melodramas because even though people claim Kirky was a bad boy, he was never prosecuted by the courts in all his suspected cases, in the eyes of the law, he is still an innocent man. 

Police have been killing murderers from I was child and yet we have brook a society of more criminals. It signals that the technique of crime fighting is at its best ineffective. Until we address the social maladies that breeds criminals then we will be doing this process over and over again. 

Police Officers are merely slaves who were given guns and now feel as if they are masters and so to feel truly important in this society they must enslave others. Their guns and badges does not make then a master, they are still slaves with only a driving whip and a free pass. They are the agents of change and they are not using this weaponry effectively. 

We have proven that killing our young men only stalls the crime rate for a few years until our pubescent boys become adults face the same pressures of those that are gone before them. They have not been socialized how to deal efficaciously with peer pressure , lack of available employment, covetousness and masculine validation. Every young man wants to feel important in his community. He wants women to love him, his elders to admire his accomplishments and his peers to envy and worship him. Our young men are not schooled on how to be adult men of virtues. 

Gussy father deserted him and his brothers when they were children. Gussy was never accorded proper values by a male role model. His father abandoned his sons and left them to their own plights. 

His mother hustled on the street side to send them to school. They lived in abject poverty. People did not even want to take a glass of water from their house to drink primarily because of how the place reeked of squalor. And Gussy managed by means unknown to rise out of his derelict state to become a true gem in our communities. 

People claim Gussy was a scammer, he may have been but that is the course that most of our young men are force to  take because our government, leaders and people like even me have failed to create avenues for employment and occupation for our disaffected youths. 

We have failed our children. We failed Gussy. People said Gussy had options, I believed he didn't have much. Imagine growing up in house with too many children and feeling embarrassed as a teenage about where you live. Gussy's mother never turned away any child from playing with her children. Gussy wanted more for his family and scamming may have allocated him the avenue to do so. 

A lot of money comes with great responsibility. Money attracts people, it is a compelling concept and a magnetic factor. Money is such a powerful tool in Jamaica. People want money more than religion or anything else. Money is the machinery to survival. Money make people want to be your friend. The good, the bad and the indifferent. We have to choose wisely who we are and who we allow to be in our company. Having money does not insure us from certain demise. Money only seems to create more problems. 

Gussy may have needed someone to teach him how to effectively utilize his money and how to guide his financial future, I would have opted to be that person if only he had requested that I did. But Gussy is still young and easily distracted by momentary gratification in his life. He probably thought me like most people wanted his money and were only pretending to care about his well being. 

Gussy like many young people think that the accumulation of wealth should be used for chaos and funding criminal networks. Money should be used for the advancement of our society and community. If some of these scammers were venture capitalist, funding talents and entrepreneurial ideas within our communities, we would not have to bury so many of these scammers. But it all chalks down to values. The values one embraces ultimately decides what choices we will make as an individual. 

I hope Gussy's life is a lesson to our young men that this bad culture is only a temporary gratification. All gangsters must die. Do not become collateral damage. You should never put your self in precarious position that people can reason out you to be a liability to society and are for we by circumstances to annihilate you. 

I see his friends mourn for him and I know the lessons learned from his death may be short lived. They feel fiercely about the need for change because his death is recent, as time goes by and the hurt palliates, they too may fall back into old habits. People do not change overnight but I hope Gussy's death was a lesson to them. 

Where is the Justice in our society?

People view justice differently depending on how it suits their individual needs. I see a man readily advocate the murder of an innocent man because his friend was offended by the said man yet will quickly jump to physically assault someone who offends him.

So a crime becomes OK if it is seen from our perspective.

My grandmother always said that show me your friends and I will tell you who you are. Why are you surprised that a man who endorses gangsters and rove with alleged thugs would defend the humanity rights of a simple boy from no where, with no money, no gangster ties and no clout.


Whenever someone close to me dies, I am force to check myself. Some people death does not faze them. I go through periods of introspection where I question my own humanity and what role do I play in this grand scheme of things. I question the value of my life. I see my humanity within every other human being and that is what often makes the ending of a human life so troublesome to my weary mind. I value everyone, even some who we might deem do not deserve it.


Everybody cannot be right. We will face injustices but what we do about it decides how our children will handle it later and what kind of society we are shaping for our children. Imagine if our ancestors just sat back and watch the white supremacist keep us in slavery, we would still be a nation in slavery with bigger issues than we have now.


One day you here another day some punk slips you into unconscious oblivion. I look at these little boys walking around in my natal community whose mothers cannot afford to send them to school but they are still having children themselves. These boys who are stealing people's rabbits and puppies, selling them to unsuspecting buyers for money. Yet their mothers are busy wearing hairstyles, buying new clothes and "breeding" again for some "careless nigger". I mused that in all probability one of these little boys might take my life in the future. Not just a probability, at the rate of things... a damn near possibility.




What do you suppose we as Jamaicans lack most ? Comment answers. I think empathy. We have become a selfish people only thinking about ourselves and our own and whatever we can get at the price of whoever with disregards for whomever...We do not think that "what if this had happened to me?' would the taking of this my life be a fair price? Would death be a fair punishment? What is this was my family?


We do not think like that,we say its ok, or i do not care because it never happened to anybody for me etc.

Conflict Resolution to fight Crime in Jamaica

I was watching the news last night where a family member was murdered because she controlled a family house and there was an ongoing dispute over it. I think one of the biggest catalyst for crime and violence is domestic disputes and until we can find effective ways to resolve our issues than resorting to murder then we will never have a peaceful jamaica. As a youth politician I believe that we need a rigorous conflict resolution programme that engages our community and we need mediators who can help to settle disputes before they escalate into body bags and funerals.




We have to build community programmes and outreach centres where mediators are placed within communities that have several flare up of intermittent violence to assist in helping citizens alleviate some of the disparities and frictions that often arises during their day to day associations.

People in Jamaica are not taught to apologise. This is a central issue within our society where people refuse to admit and acquiesce whenever they are wrong . We need an overhaul of our morality continuum. I heard that the minister of education, The Honourable Ronny Thwaites purported that a tolerance subject be added to the school curriculum.

I believe that our school needs an ethics class where children are encourage from youth to be tolerant of people, to understand that someone's opinion will differ from yours as people have divergent views and different experiences. People who do not conform to your beliefs should not be ostracised, murdered or maimed because you are offended. Children are encourage to always seek mediation instead of "chucking" violence whenever you and someone have a misunderstanding. We must emphasize the value of human life and relay the notion that murdering someone does not solved any problem in hindsight, it creates more violence such as reprisals etc.

We must also encourage our children in this curriculum to learn that walking away does not mean you are coward and even so cowards will always live to see another day. We should teach them also that sometimes the only way out is to stand up for what you believe in. Do not let anyone cower you into fear and submission by duress. We only submit to people that we respect and value their existence because it complements our humanity.


We need to rebuild our trust in the police force. Crime and Violence escalates because people with knowledge of criminal activities and perpetrators are afraid to give information to the police because most crime lords are alleged friends and allies of Police Officers. Until we get a collaborative effort between citizens and police officers we will not be able to eradicate the stench of criminality within our communities.


Politicians often think that crimes are committed on the basis of needs and wants. This maybe true but there is a growing dynamism within communities in Jamaica where the prevalence of guns and the accessibility
to guns for many young men has made assassins wealthy and parlours a very thriving business. There are bigger issues because in areas where Member of Parliaments and Councillors are absent than young men murdering and stealing. Where they are not role models, governance, young men easily become soldiers for the wrong set of people.


Our children especially our young men should be persuaded not to carry out people's dirty work. When I was a child we went to church every Sunday. We need to get back to our roots, Most of our values and morals are stemmed from our Christian principles we were taught as children. Our children need to go to bible school so that they can be morally shaped.