Dear Editor,

There is much yapping in all media about Jamaica’s 50th year of Independence — the so-called jubilee year. Yet, despite all the warm and fuzzy feelings that the political directorate and their media wizards are trying to conjure up, reality looms ever so closely, nay threatenly, in the daily lives of ordinary Jamaicans. The image we see is a beleaguered people — hopeless and despairing.

Fifty years after our vaulted independence, our education system is in a shambles, producing cohorts who can mostly only regurgitate inane trivia as is paraded on the Schools Challenge Quiz television show. Nothing like their counterparts in India, Korea or Singapore who create computer software that runs the world.

Fifty years on we have an obsolete education system leading to the miseducation of our children and with factory-like efficiency produces mostly lost generations of youths.

Fifty years after attaining our hard fought Independence from uncaring colonial masters, the stitches of our social fabric, that which binds us as a people, is shredding and busting at every seam. Our male youths see themselves as mere clones of the ‘Ugly American’… African American ghetto culture …gangs, guns, drugs and bloodletting.

And like their mirror counterpart they have caused havoc and let loose the dogs of war — internecine warfare, gang warfare, turf warfare — war on society and its values. Thus in our 50th year of self-governance we have the distinction of being the murder and crime epicentre of the planet.

Fifty years after winning our Independence we have an economy that generates mostly unemployment and hardship for the vast majority of Jamaicans. It produces one-tenth the mean national income of Singapore, Barbados or Malaysia — nations that are the same age as us in terms of self-government. Yet our political directorate and their media conjurers would have us blushing with pride and prancing and whining in the streets in this our Jubilee year.

Fifty years on we have no independence, rather total dependence on foreign monopolists for our energy production. Whether PdVSA of Venezuela or North-East Electrics of Korea there is no independent decision that can be taken concerning our future energy direction… yet the political directorate and their media clowns would have us blushing with pride in this our 50th year of Independence come early August morning.

Thus this lonely soul hereby and thereby commit, that come this August morning, in this the 50th year after our Independence, to pour out libations to our ancestors in atonement; to wail in remorseful grief for having, as a people, squandered the promise of their hard fought and won victory; and in penitent atonement rededicate this life to the continuation of that struggle …the struggle for the real fruits of independence… not this media charade concocted by the political directorate and their media henchmen.

Trevor Bogle

Bogle108@yahoo.com