So Hurricane Matthew has moved away from Jamaica. Both Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Opposition Leader Portia Simpson Miller correctly urged Jamaicans to take the hurricane seriously. Prime Minister Andrew Holness also anticipated the usual cynicism of Jamaicans who usually complain that they have done a lot of preparation for nothing. And he said that we better get used to it — no doubt in reference to climate change.

Hurricane Charlie hit Jamaica on August 17, 1951. In 1953 the Roman Catholic Church dedicated Jamaica to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is quite uncanny that since that time we have had the full onslaught of only one cyclone — Hurricane Gilbert on September 12, 1988.

Every year, in August, some Roman Catholics trek to Our Lady of Assumption Church in Morant Bay to pray for protection from storms — no doubt to the laughter and ridicule of others.

Tomorrow (October 7) is the Feast of the Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. Many Roman Catholics will say rosaries tomorrow for further protection from natural disasters. Many hurricanes, over the years, even before 1951, have headed straight to Jamaica and have turned away within one or two hundred kilometres from the Jamaican coastline.

Some believe that turning away from Jamaica by the hurricanes is as a result of prayers, while others say that the warnings are just a ploy for sales to get us to buy extra food, flashlights, batteries and other materials to protect ourselves and our homes. Small wonder then that Hurricane Gilbert caught many unprepared in 1988. Since that time. however, Jamaicans take hurricane warnings far more seriously than they did before 1988.

But Jamaicans have always been cynical — a carry-over from the days of piracy and slavery where fooling people was the order of the day. And being cynical, they do not believe that prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary have anything to do with the turning away of hurricanes even if there have been fewer hurricanes in the last 60-odd years of prayers and pilgrimage.

However, the cynicism is understandable in light of the fact that many in the society deliberately fool the masses from the days of slavery. It certainly explains the rumour in 1831 that “free paper” had come but the slave owners were hiding the truth which led to the Christmas rebellion in 1831, after which Sam Sharpe was hanged.

The tendency to be cynical also explains why, in 1969, when man went on the moon for the first time, very few Jamaicans believed it.

The first successful trip to the moon in 1969 caused such a great sensation that it was the topic for the section called “Young Catholic Opinions” that appeared in The Catholic Opinion, then a weekly newspaper. A group of teenagers from the Holy Rosary Catholic Youth Organisation were asked to write our views on the question: “Have moon trips lessened man’s belief in God?” The question itself was testimony of the cynicism and ignorance that abounded at the time.

And speaking of ignorance, around that time in 1969, a caller to Jamaica’s very first call-in radio programme

What’s your grouse? asked host Phillip Jackson: “I hear so much about man going to the moon. How come we never hear of anyone going to the sun?”

Phillip Jackson replied that he thought the sun was too hot for anyone to attempt that, to which the caller asked, “Then couldn’t they have gone at night, Sir?”

Many believe firmly that AIDS was created to decrease the population of black people. I also wonder because anything is possible. Forty-three years ago, in 1973, I was a teacher at the Lluidas Vale Youth Camp near Worthy Park in north-west St Catherine, one of the forerunners of the HEART programme. Much of the tinned food consumed by the staff and campers was imported.

Some of the campers complained that a certain foreign tinned food was being served to campers to ‘cut their nature’. One Monday morning at the weekly assembly, the then camp director, the late Lloyd Leslie, assured the campers that there was no plan to serve them any food to ‘cut their nature’. But were the campers right or wrong? You never know. And to be fair to Leslie, if there was indeed such a plan he might not have known either.

Being Christian, I do not support fornication, at the same time I could never support any altering of the body to control the population. I hope it was not really so. But in light of how the Jamaican society is organised from five centuries ago, the suspicion was understandable. Initially, I was shocked that most of the staff acted as if they were running an approved school, and this alone would cause suspicion, if previously unknown food were served.

High-pressure political campaigning, and high-pressure salesmanship, have only served to aggravate the problem. ‘Politics is politics’ and ‘business is business’. This usually means fooling people to vote a certain way or fooling them to buy products or pay for a service. Many people then become cynical about everything, including hurricane warnings, especially if it is the norm that they do not hit Jamaica.

Some will take hurricane precautions only after the “big man” takes the precaution because if there were a racket he would know. And when people are asked to evacuate, they will always be reluctant if they think that the request — or demand — was made with a view to rob them when they are away from their homes. The fact that this has happened in the past does not help the situation at all.

It is the younger generation, more than the older, that takes hurricane warnings seriously. They understand how to go on the Internet and track the passage of hurricanes. It is they who sometimes tell their parents that the hurricane is for real and that it is heading our way. And this is one of the solutions to cynicism: more relevant education. The other solution is an overhaul of society to encourage honesty at all levels, which will put an end to suspicion.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com