Dear Editor,

It is partly because of our people’s large appetite for tangible gestures, as shown by our calls for reparation for slavery, which has made our relationships with each other, with others, and with God so strained.

The Jamaican National Anthem prays for intangible assets such as vision, but we exhaustingly keep looking backwards with requests for the expungement of marred US criminal records of Marcus Garvey and reparation for slavery.

I suspect that Portia Simpson Miller would love to be a part of the legacy which matches those said legacies, but a better direction to look for such is to our future, which she has shown with her concern for our children’s safety and well-being. She must, however, remain steadfast in doing so.

The ‘industry’ of slavery was a wicked one, so much so that it is mind-boggling to conceive a dollar figure on what our forefathers experienced. Actually, insurgency, as we are seeing with Islamist rebels across the Middle East and East Africa, would seem to be a more fitting response to the abomination of slavery than “selling our forgiveness” or our “do not recall”. It is this kind of ‘selling out’ by those among us whom we entrusted with authority, the same authority which helped to make the slave trade possible in the first place.

I am sorry, but I want none of this money that we are asking for, which is soiled with our fathers’ and mothers’ blood and tears. As recording reggae artiste Anthony B sings, in his track, Damage, “You don’t have to say you’re sorry.” What we really want is for our children to learn and play in freedom as they should. This does not require reparation dollars, it requires a resolve that we will eliminate any impediment to freedom, whether domestic or foreign, by any means.

Andre O Sheppy

Norwood, St James

astrangely@outlook.com