Dear Editor,

The proposed mining in the Cockpit Country is now a pivotal test for citizens living in the region.

The short-sighted plan to use bulldozers to defile the land on which true courage was carved long ago by our ancestors. Our heritage is now a conflict between patriotic citizens with stout principled hearts and a pimpish regime hell-bent on using political treason to trick constituents of the area.

Obviously, these communities with deep roots inside the soil and boundaries of Cockpit Country cannot allow this Government to trade our immortal legacy for a few fistfuls of fleeting dollars. Every citizen born and raised in Cockpit Country knows its history and is endowed with the same immutable spirit of our ancient Maroon warriors which is still alive in the vastness of precipitous misty gullies in those dry, dusty caves and plethora of clear ice-cold underground springs and rivers meandering to the sea in the core of those fog-crested, lush bluish-green, majestic mountains on crusty trunk monster trees rising up from deep wet valleys to the sun for hundreds of years. And, yes, the spirits of our ancestors are yellow boas slithering quietly along damp forest floor hunting rats and on faces of those massive walls of vertical white/yellowish slabs of rocks — standing like God’s soldiers in harmonious equanimity with the hard-working people of the region.

These qualities are only a few of the many priceless and precious mettle that shaped the character of every citizen of Cockpit Country region. A proud people who, like Captain Cudjoe of the Maroons, stand ready and firm and will not yield an inch of this land that sustains our families, homes, schools, banana fields, and yam farms to a bunch of uncaring ruling elites who sees the Cockpit Country only as a rural bushy patch where backward country people come from.

“We’ll have to be a bit stubborn today…” — Anonymous

Jeffery Wright

Toronto, Canada

jeffery.wright@live.ca