We were dismayed to read Ms Leah Tavares-Finson’s take on Mr Christopher Coke, if only because we expected better from a student of the political sciences.

According to Sunday’s edition of our Style Observer, Ms Taveres-Finson, the daughter of Government Senator Tom Tavares-Finson, premised her defence of Mr Coke, who is currently facing drug and gun-running charges in the United States, on the social benefits that he allegedly brought to the community of Tivoli Gardens.

Coming as it did so many weeks after evaporation of the myth surrounding Mr Coke’s inviolability, we marvel that Ms Tavares-Finson has still not come to realise the significance of the past 10 or so months.

That she could really be pinning the title of hero on a man who — despite being deemed innocent until proven guilty — cannot even, by the most liberal subjective standard, fit into contemporary definition of the word, is truly amazing.

Ms Tavares-Finson’s observation that Mr Coke has been able to do for Tivoli Gardens what “so many politicians can only dream of accomplishing”, is as serious an indictment of her own mentality as it is of the rest of us who have for so long condoned such low standards in governance.

For if it is really true that Mr Coke’s reign over Tivoli Gardens constitutes the ideal, shouldn’t we all be looking to replicate and perpetuate donmanship? Shouldn’t we be taking Ms Tavares-Finson’s advice to ‘leave Presi alone’? Shouldn’t we be apologising to Prime Minister Bruce Golding for our strident criticism of his resistance to the United States’ extradition request for Mr Coke, and for insisting that he come clean on the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips affair?

The truth is that the reality of which Ms Tavares-Finson speaks is simply incompatible with the universal tenets of good governance. Tivoli Gardens is a community within Jamaica which is supposed to be governed by a duly elected government. To posit otherwise is folly of the most pitiful order.

As we understand it, garrisons of the nature of Tivoli Gardens are not representative of the paradises that some people are trying to make them out to be.

Horror stories involving the forced submission of teenaged girls — and boys — to the sexual perversions of dons are being painfully documented by people like Ms Betty Ann Blaine, a tireless children’s rights advocate.

We have yet, as a society, to afford due respect and attention to the cry that Ms Blaine and others like her have been making on behalf of this most vulnerable section of society.

We are sure that they too have opinions on this most emotional topic.

It would be enlightening to hear them.