THE EDITOR, Sir:
LIKE YOU my heart bled when I read Fr. Ho Lung's column on Monday. There is absolutely no reason that people in this beautiful land should be so cruel to each other and to their children.
Recently the Denzel Washing-ton film, 'Antoine Fisher', was released and it gave some sort of explanation for the reasons we are so cruel. Slavery, it seemed, has left us quite a legacy of cruelty which our society has embraced wholeheartedly in our music and our politics and our peacetime law enforcement. Violence has become the current ethic of our country, it seems. But it is time to break the cycle and determine our own course.
How we treat our children will determine the hands into which we place our country and our own lives in the future. What we sow we reap.
There is no escaping where Jamaica is going to end up if we continue to 'murder' our children. They are the ones who are now growing up with violence and cruelty as their only answer to life's problems.
We have allowed violence to become our only option to solving our problems because we have no idea where we are headed as a nation and how we should get there. I suggest we return to the principles of the MAP (Motto, Anthem and Pledge) for the direction out of our confusion.
I fully endorse your comments about prosecution of this mother, Mr. Editor. It is when we ignore the ability of the law to reorder our society that we pervert justice.
However, the process should not stop at prosecution, we should take the opportunity to retrain her to become the kind of mother this child needs. For it is a lack of knowledge that causes us to be destructive as we ourselves are destroyed. Break the cycle.
I am, etc.,
YVONNE O. COKE
Yvonne_Coke @hotmail.com
Hands Across Jamaica For
Righteousness
110-21 Francis Lewis Blvd.
Queens Village, New York
Via Go-Jamaica
