By Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor 
Blackwood Meeks
YOU KNOW something? I do not like the new bypass that avoids Old Harbour and wherever else. I know that some people call it a highway. That's part of my difficulty with it.
Takes me back to some years ago when there was a serious accident in Montego Bay involving a minibus and a truck and some people I knew very well. Consequently, when the news reached Antigua, where I lived at the time, I was involved in conversations about it. The news, by the way, had identified the location as a highway having more than one lane. During one conversation about the accident, someone asked me rather incredulously. "Y'all have highways in Jamaica? With more than one lane?"
See, a highway means certain specific things to specific people.
In this case I think the individual meant to convey her understanding that a highway is a ting in big countries, where people have great distances to travel. And, oh yes, where speed is of the essence. I think it was also her understanding that likkle people in Third World countries should guard against getting too uppity and ascribing highway status to lanes and streets and avenues and bypasses.
POTHOLES
Especially when they are full of potholes and have so many twists and turns, hills and gullies that they are strong in the runnings for an attraction at Disney World.
Before you get out your poison pens and begin to roll out letters about how Amina doan want the people to progress let me declare my Luddite tendencies. Save you the trouble. Then let me state that the pothole business is definitely not the case with this particular beautiful, spanking new highway. Its potholes or lack of same has nothing to do with why I do not like it.
Although, I must say that seriously, I often wonder what on earth possessed the builders of the original roadways in Jamaica. Too many of them just jack up between the devil and the deep blue sea. On some of them if you glance to enjoy the view of the sea you are likely to end up in or find yourself rolling down a precipice. Like how we can't do anything in Jamaica except you commission a feasibility study and write a million page proposal, I wonder if any agency would fund a study as to how many people get motion sickness just trying to get from Kingston to Ocho Rios. Or from St. Mary to Kingston via the Junction.
Legend has it that the original designers, architects and builders of roads in Jamaica were wild animals. Dem walk de same pass every morning and evening till de bush bruk down and people just come and spread asphalt over it. So, in truth all modern day effort to make amends and straighten corners should be welcomed, right? I think another study should be done on how many corners could be straightened if we just pay a few people minimum wage to keep the corners free of bush and improve visibility all year round.
Do we have to wait until Christmas to give out a likkle bushing as a special project to provide some Christmas spending money?
It might turn out to be more beneficial than we first realise to keep all our corners free of bush all year round.
You know, like encourage constant vigilance so that we are not ambushed on the way to some international forum with some dire threats of what will befall us on the highway if we do not travel in accordance with the speed and toll fees designated by people who abrogate onto themselves the right to name some bypasses highway and determine who should so
travel.
Like suppose there really is a highway named the Arafat Bypass, located in very fine print somewhere on the Road Map to Peace, but you have to travel on Murder Arafat as an Option Bypass in order to get there.
Mayhem and bloodshed. Seem to be critical components of big country highways.
GLOBALISED HIGHWAY
I made the same mistake twice and ended upon the Old Harbour Bypass, once during the early stages and once about a week ago. Well that mistake not making me again. Even with the thing under construction and the big signs saying "Slow", maybe meaning slow to read and slower still to understand, is like the thing has been mistaken for a race track. And the country already on high speed. Speed chase, speed boat, speeding crime rate.
In that sense, at least, we gone completely international, globalised. For when you on foreign substances you want to feel like yu flying. So every bus, truck and car has become on unidentified low flying object.
Maybe the problem is that we want to boast that we have a globalised highway. One that looks just like those in any place foreign. And that is really why I do not like the highway.
When I get on it, I don't know where in the world I am. What is the meaning of all that metal and steel and looping? Anyting dat lick dat, stay licked. And the metal and steel are just sitting there, positively hypnotic, like something straight out of an optical illusion, testing, daring you to make an acquaintance up close and personal.
I want to look like Jamaica. Real. Kinder, Gentler. See Holland Bamboo? I love that. I have visions of Jamaican highways that look like that, like downtown Kingston used to look before someone got the idea that trees harbour criminals even as they preach at us about environmental protection and sustainability.
Every time I turn around in Jamaica I want to see what Caribbean giant of a cultural historian Kamau Braithwaite means when he says the geography of the particular location must also be factored into the elements which give rise to cultural expressions. I want to verify and experience how our culture is so colourful.
Once upon a time the energy campaign had a lovely little slogan "Jamaica is too beautiful to speed through." It did more than encourage drivers to "raise their foot" and save energy.
Its appeal was in exhorting us to take time to enjoy the beauty of this blessed island such as we find not just in Jamaicascapes, but in the people selling this or that from glass cases on the roadway and serving up conversations as engaging as the backdrop.
I want to know if we can't construct highways that say "Proud to be Jamaican" as opposed to proud to get lost in the exigencies of globalisation.
