By Balford Henry, Acting News EditorSPEAKING LAST night at the opening of Emancipation Park, PSOJ President Oliver Clarke said that history's prime value was to apply past experience to current and future problems. He added that there was a real job ahead of us, to emancipate Jamaica from the overwhelming challenges we face, right now.
"The over two million Jamaicans who live here today want and need to feel that their glory days are ahead of them. To make our glory days ahead of us, we must get rid of the slave masters of today. These are the criminals and the drug dons who enslave entire communities all over Jamaica and in this fine 200-year old city.
"Every drug addict is mentally enslaved. Every drug addict is materially enslaved. Every drug dealer fosters violence. It is the criminal and the druggist and the extortionist who dispense justice in many city communities. It is they, just as the slave masters of the past, who tell the people where they can work, where they walk, where they can live, where they can go to church, what they can hope for.
"In 1834 there were 310,000 slaves made free, today there are almost three million people who are increasingly enslaved by criminals and drug addicts. The drug industry flourishes by enslaving the mind of the addict. The drug industry flourishes when its cash flow overwhelms a society and corrupts leaders.
"Our glory days are ahead of us and those days will come when we have rid the society of criminals, when the cost of hospital services created by patching up the wounded can be used to produce jobs and when the terrible high costs of burying the frequent dead can be used to pay for children to go to school."
In his speech Prime Minister Patterson suggested that the park should be seen as the first step in the rejuvenation of the city and to return to the activity of seeking to live clean, wholesome and peaceful lives.
Mr. Patterson said that the price the country was paying for social alienation, especially of its young men, for turning our backs on our culture, for failing to harness the talents of our people, was not just poverty and crime, serious as they are.
"The price we pay includes cultural chaos, the absence of national identity and the weakening of our values and attitudes."
He said that the park was meant to celebrate and mark "a glorious and challenging beginning which had beckoned our forebears to rediscovery of self and the shaping of a new order of society. This park commemorates the ingenuity of the people from whom we sprang."
There was also a bit of partisan jest in the spirit of the current electioneering period, when Mr. Holness pointed out that "in the middle of summer the grass (at the park) was very green." Mr. Patterson responded that, "even orange is green until it ripens."
The function was chaired by Professor Rex Nettleford. Other speakers included the Custos of St. Andrew, the Rev. Carmen Stewart, the chairman of the National Housing Trust, Kingsley Thomas, the Mayor of Kingston, Councillor Marie Atkins, the General Secretary of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions, Lloyd Goodleigh.
The Jamaica Military Band, the NHT Chorale, the National Dance Theatre Company and Jimmy Tucker entertained the crowd.
Mr. Thomas said that the park would improve the quality of life in the city and that the NHT would be "fully and irrevocably" committed to maintain it to the high standards that the citizens of the municipality deserve.
