Dear Editor,

Having written regarding the lack of planning that is being revealed as the course of events overtake Bull Bay and its citizens and then being advised of the massive salary increase to Government by the Government, I am left to conclude that I am in the wrong business.

I clearly should have become a politician so that I could pay myself and take advantage of land deals and special favours that accrue to their offices. I clearly did not need to study and work diligently to excel in my less-than field of endeavour. I would also not really care what the politicians chose to do as long as it didn’t affect me. This, however, is a false expectation.

The much-talked-about South Coast Highway is turning out to be as elegant a statement of political power as demonstrated by Robert Moses, the famous American technocrat who ploughed highways through the neighbourhoods of those he thought to be less than himself. Now, in my neighbourhood, a narrow strip of land between the sea and the foothills of lower south-east St Andrew, the once two-lane road that was the conduit for aggregate and other minerals from St Thomas and St Andrew has been made into a four-lane highway with a First World jersey barrier to boot.

In addition to the barrier between the two lanes that will move aggregate twice as fast and tourists to St Thomas at warp speed, the remaining land on either side of the road between the 127-year-old police station at Nine Miles to the road at Shooters Hill is now fenced with 10-foot high concrete walls on both sides of the road.

I am an architect of the lesser class in Jamaica and I am trying as hard as I can to see where the benefit to the citizens of the areas will be in this dispensation. To add to my despair for my neighbourhood, I find that the entire hillside from Limestone Quarry Hill to the sea and from Nine Miles to Eight Miles has been designated a quarry zone. I don’t own a truck, don’t have a kiln to process limestone or a crusher to process limestone from this rocky situation, so as they say in Jamaica, “It look like mi salt.”

Hearing the current conversations on radio between politicians and their radio advocates on both sides, it’s clear that as one person in Jamaica my concerns are of no matter because of the greater good. So much for the Christian principles of looking out for the least of us.

Hugh M Dunbar

Bull Bay, St Andrew

hmdenergy@gmail.com