Dear Editor,

The local news media often refer to our pervasive and spiralling crime problem as a “monster”. Although well-intentioned, this practice takes this real and serious matter, gives it form, and puts it into the realms of science fiction and fictitious tales, which serve to make us more comfortable and complacent about it. Such a perception of crime does nothing to help to counter it and, perhaps, might serve to distract us from how we should really view and treat it.

When I hear of childhood friends becoming deadly gang rivals to each other, of the significant prevalence of chronic hunger in Jamaica, where, as recording artistes, Protoje and Chronixx, in their song Who Knows sing that fruits are falling from trees in abundance in “the country”, and when I hear a seven-year-old child recounting that her grade school teacher told her and her classmates not to lie for Jesus’s sake, when it should be for their own sakes, I have to put crime down to being a “black hole” instead. It represents an absence of light that feeds on this light.

However, a black hole, though real, might be too much of a distant, figurative description of crime, so we could use “the veil” instead.

I have to commend 311 Crime Stop and its ads which help to lift the veil and allow the light to be shone on how seemingly petty crimes and the more heinous ones are intrinsically linked to each other. Obviously, this along with our current crime-fighting attempts are insufficient. We need more “light”.

The media, the Church, schoolteachers and schools, politicians, and all well-thinking Jamaicans need to get on board with a drive towards the enlightenment of everyone of us.

But I acknowledge that a people who have been hungry in mind and body are less able to see the light, much less to disseminate it. We need greater love, faith and, as Tarrus Riley sings in Beware, more bellyful and brain food (education) for our health; and it’s this lack of health, in its true and complete form, even before perpetrators of crime are born, which is at the heart of the crime and violence.

Andre O Sheppy

Norwood, St James

astrangely@outlook.com