The aftermath of Hurricane Melissa was like a bucket of cold water to the face of Jamaicans, exposing the deep cracks in our so-called ‘Out of many, one people’ motto.

The idea expressed in the motto is a powerful national aspiration. Yet in Western Jamaica — home to the tourism capital of Montego Bay — this motto is tested daily. Here the lived experience often reveals a Jamaica of many realities, separated by starkly different Jamaicas that exist within a single coastline.

As the mountains of garbage piled up across our beloved island, we saw a peculiar equality emerge — the storm became the great equaliser, making a mockery of the divisions between political loyalists, the devout and the secular, and even between the dutiful voter and the disengaged citizen. This shared vulnerability in crisis casts a harsh light on our national ideal, revealing it to be more illusion than reality.

The Government’s response, or lack thereof, was a true test of this ‘One people’ business. The National Solid Waste Management Authority was completely overwhelmed. Citizens reported garbage sitting for weeks, a health hazard that predated the hurricane but was only made worse. And when the municipal corporations tried to address it, all we got was political theatre.

The ultimate recourse for many was not a reliable public service, but private negotiation — searching for a State-owned truck and offering a bribe to clear one’s own refuse. What a state of affairs.

And let’s not even get started on the racial tensions that continue to simmer beneath the surface. Politicians love to throw around loaded terms like “massa” as if we’re still under colonial rule. Valourising the “brown” identity over the black majority? Sounds like more of that “one people” hogwash to me. Race remains a potent weapon in our politics, exposing the raw, unresolved divisions that the motto tries to gloss over.

Montego Bay embodies Jamaica’s central contradiction. It is the engine of the tourism industry, a sector built on projecting an image of a unified, vibrant, and welcoming people to the world. This tourism Jamaica is a land of resilient, creative, and charismatic individuals.

But this glossy image exists alongside the grindstone Jamaica experienced by many residents. The city’s economy creates a sharp divide between the zones of all-inclusive luxury and the communities where workers live. This separation is not just physical but economic and social, fostering a sense of being an outsider in one’s own home.

We need to move beyond the motto as a mere slogan and start making it a reality through good governance and civic re-education. Less political grandstanding, more problem-solving. Less partisan noise, more shared responsibility. Only then can we truly reclaim our agency and build the unity we so desperately crave.

yannickpessoa@yahoo.com