Dear Editor,

One would have thought that in an age of renaissance and the accessibility of education our society would be trending towards civility and a higher standard of life and living, but alas not.

As a society we seem to be on a slope towards anarchy and indecency. It is going downhill like a semi on Spur Tree Hill without brakes.

Recently I happened to be near a certain high school at dismissal time and observed how the students hurried off campus like unherded animals into the town. Many of them headed to the bus park and I noticed that, despite the fact that there were many different types of transportation waiting, the students headed towards the vehicles that had the highest syncopated and rhythmic music. The decibel level in some were deafening, but they jostled to get into those.

One of the buses drove out from the park and stopped beside the car I was in, and believe me, the vibration from that bus literally caused my car to vibrate.

Soon, I surmise, we are going to have a society which suffers from auditory delusions/hallucinations with senses numb to decency.

I recalled that when I was in high school True Confession and some pictures in our biology text might have been the most pornographic literature that students were exposed to. But now, the Internet has exposed teens to pornography, gun violence, and drugs. There is also much lewd, rude, and crude portrayals in the media and it seems there is no one to bell the cat because like parents so are children

The vulgarity and playing of dirty lyrics called dancehall music on the minibuses on which children travel makes me, an adult, blush. No wonder they could not find an appropriate festival song. Most musical creations are gutter music and for such today’s youth crave.

It is calamitous, catastrophic, chaotic, and cataclysmic that Jamaica, land we love, could get to such level of degradation.

Maybe the Minister of Culture Olivia Grange should roll out a programme that seeks to ‘reculturalise’ the nation. A good place to begin could be to censor vulgarity like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has done in England. If we don’t, indecency might become the new normal. I concur with my friend Rohan Budhai that, “Dancehall, however, has sunken into the pits of sexual decadence and is now an embarrassment to our society.” Dancehall has produced a subculture of ‘deplorables’ that demean our unique culture. And may I add, a once decent and Christian country.

I may be suffering from generation gap syndrome, but I hope I am not alone in my thoughts. We cannot as a nation cast our eyes away from such erosion in culture and call it free speech. This type of free speech comes at a high cost.

Can we really continue to give airtime to DJs to play music laced with profanity and explicit sexuality, even to young teens whose minds should be focused on learning/education?

I may be too old-fashioned or too Christocentric to believe that the powers that be need to intervene and fix this abhorrent phenomenon. I happened to see some videos parading on social media from time to time demeaning women and I would have thought that there would be a public outcry from that specie of society but, instead, they seem to be the ones enjoying it most. Their prancing and gyrations with breasts jumping like jello and prominent bottoms skimpily exposed are a disgrace to decency.

Do we now understand why there is an erosion of discipline in schools, churches, and society in general? It is because children live what they learn. Miss Grange, please do something to lift our culture to a higher level or we are going to be no better than beasts.

Certainly the current trends are appalling and not fit for decent consumption. They are degrading to the decent people in our society. Schoolchildren, especially, are at risk as these types of music expose them to that which they ought not to experience at such an early age. As Budhai observed in a recent editorial in The Howlers: “Our young girls have embraced the wild abandon of this loathsome music blaring from the speakers of the dancehall, public transport, and even the radio stations. Sex is no longer taboo. I have seen videos of children having sex in the classroom in front of other students who seem uninterested in what is happening. Videos also abound of young girls publicly performing simulated oral sex as encouraged by a song promoting the milky Nestle product Ensure.”

How much worse can this subculture get?

Well-thinking, civilised Jamaicans along with the Church need to launch a crusade against these negative trends in our society and lift up the trumpet and loud let it ring from King’s House to the poor house that we just can’t continue this way. If we don’t try to get a foot on the brakes we may allow Sodom and Gomorrah to look virtuous.

Lets not ever forget the words of holy writ, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (Philippians 4:8)

Dr Burnett Robinson

Blpprob@aol.com