Dear Editor,

The images are jarring. Across France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, hundreds of thousands are in the streets, clashing with police, setting bins ablaze, and shutting down schools.

Their grievances? Rising fuel costs, dilapidated schools, unaffordable housing, and the fear that their pensions might not keep pace with inflation. They are fighting to preserve a standard of living that most Jamaicans can only dream of.

The uncomfortable truth is this: Europeans are protesting the potential loss of a comfortable life, while Jamaicans are enduring the loss of basic dignity in near silence.

Let us compare the “bases” of our societies. In Europe, the protest trigger in France was the state of schools — leaking roofs and teacher shortages. In Jamaica, nearly 20 per cent of the population lives below the upper-middle-income poverty line, surviving on less than US$8.30 a day. Nearly 79,000 Jamaicans are trapped in multidimensional poverty, deprived of basic health, education, and living standards. Europeans are marching to save their social safety nets; Jamaicans are grappling with the absence of one.

The contrast in security is even starker. Europeans are protesting for safer streets and better public services. In Jamaica, while the murder rate has seen a welcome decline, the country still recorded 649 homicides in 2025 — a rate that, while improved, remains catastrophically high by global standards. We are not protesting the loss of a luxury; we are enduring the normalisation of trauma.

Yet the silence here is deafening. When hundreds gathered in Cross Roads in June 2026 to protest corruption and a lack of transparency — specifically over a minister being accused of illicit enrichment and the Government’s failure to spend Hurricane Melissa relief funds — it was a rare spark. But why didn’t that spark ignite a fire?

The answer lies in a pervasive political apathy and a crushing sense of futility. Nearly half of Jamaicans (49 per cent) distrust the Government, 47 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and voter turnout has plummeted to just 29.6 per cent. We have not stopped complaining because we are satisfied; we have stopped because we believe no one is listening.

Europeans, by contrast, still believe their voices can force change. They have a baseline of institutional trust and a history of collective action that compels their leaders to respond. Their protests are a demand to maintain a high quality of life. Ours should be a demand to attain a basic one.

So I ask my fellow Jamaicans: If Europeans will shut down a city over pension reform or a leaking school roof, what should we do when our people are in multidimensional poverty, when our prime minister gaslights us about outdoor classrooms, and when corruption is treated as business as usual? When we are threatened with a slow recovery by the prime minister because of public outcry about the renting of the Digicel building, how does it look? When the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) boss gets more than America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) boss.

Jamaica, we have every reason to protest. The fact that we do not is not a sign of contentment, it is a symptom of a deeper crisis of hope that our leaders have failed to address and that we, the people, must find the courage to reclaim.

Yannick Pessoa

Montego Bay, Jamaica

yannickpessoa@yahoo.com