In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said in Parliament that the government was going to enact legislation to stop the building of houses on riverbanks. Of course, the prime minister is right; people should not build on riverbanks or in gullies. However, many times they did not build on riverbanks but soil erosion brought the rivers closer to them.

There was a feature in the Sunday Gleaner some time last year about an elderly woman who had been living in Hope Tavern, St Andrew since 1959 who was – or perhaps still is – in danger of having her house collapsing. A comment she made was that people had been saying it is her fault because she should not have built her house on the bank of the Hope River. But she pointed out that in 1959 her house was several feet from the river. Soil erosion caused by the illegal sand-mining and illegal removal of stones has put her in her plight.

If we are not careful, in the decades to come soil erosion in Hope Tavern might cause the Hope River to go as far as the road in Papine, and then later to the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. Will we at that time be saying that it was not wise to build the campus at Mona? Will we say the same about Mona Heights, Hope Pastures and Jamaica College if erosion makes its way there before reaching King’s House, and Jamaica House on its way to Half Way Tree, and God knows how much further?

So while it is wrong to build on riverbanks, it is even more wrong to remove the sand and stones from the rivers, as that is the reason for the erosion. Recently, there was a protest from a rural community about the removal of stones from a nearby river which was carried as TV news footage.

My advice is that when roads are being built the stones should not all be taken from only one river just because it might be nearest to the road construction site. An equal amount of stones should be taken from several rivers except those that have already been deprived of too many stones, where the removal of stones should be banned. So that is one thing that is wrong.

Second, in reviewing the state of the economy, I heard it in the news on one of the radio stations that the government had projected a certain amount of revenue to come from traffic fines, but that amount was not earned. This is a wrong way to plan the economy. We should not have a situation where, instead of being happy that motorists are a little better behaved than in other years, it poses a problem to the economy.

Are police being pressured to bring in traffic offenders for revenue purposes? If this is so, it will explain the complaints of police brutality. Indeed, as the mainline churches begin their observance of the season of Advent this Sunday, the behaviour of our police is sometimes reminiscent of the tax collectors of old who behaved quite similar to King Herod’s soldiers who were ordered to kill the first-born in every Jewish family.

I believe that anything that has the capacity to cause police brutality should be eliminated from the law books. And that includes this business of planning the budget around traffic fines. A better way of earning revenue could be in expanding the tourism sector to other types of tourism. It would bring in more landing and departure taxes; more people would be employed in the hotels, which would hopefully mean more income tax collected.

Third, the principle in the constitution of Jamaica regarding religion in schools should be the same as religion on buses. The constitution of Jamaica states “in no place of education shall anyone be forced into any religion contrary to his or her belief”. To preach religion to passengers on a bus who practically have no alternative other than getting off the bus, to their own inconvenience, has been a very unfair practice for a very long time.

Even further, to preach against a particular denomination, as has happened very often to Roman Catholics, is a travesty upon the rights of every Jamaican who happens to be Roman Catholic, including myself. The Reverend Al Miller, from whom I have always had difficulty in hearing a coherent sentence, has come out against the ban.

Some are calling those who support the ban on bus preachers ungodly. How would they like to have a Roman Catholic me force my beliefs on them while riding on a bus? To be fair to Jehovah’s witnesses, Mormons and Rastafarians, I have never seen any of them preaching on a bus. Nor have I seen any robed minister of religion. Yet the Gleaner cartoonist, Las May, depicts a bus preacher as a Roman Catholic or Anglican Bishop, which is misleading and unfair.

And the point has been made by others already that if Christian missionaries can preach on the buses, why not Muslims, Hindu, Rastafarians and others? I suspect that there will be another clampdown on noise in general. The bus preachers might have been the starting point.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com