Melville Cooke
I DID not know that it was possible to drive past the middle section of Knutsford Boulevard, near where it takes a deep bend before heading towards Oxford Road, without being at the mercy of the 'profilers'.
For the uninitiated, a profiler is someone who lives to be seen, who will settle for being an irritant if they cannot be important.
There is something about that section of New Kingston that pulls many of them in to buzz around like bothersome bugs, impeding the traffic with their portentously, pretentiously and often precariously parked vehicles, which themselves become focal points for focus groups of ... you guessed it, profilers.
And then along came the bald bull, Desmond the Indefatigable, the streetwise Mayor in a city that needs handling at the street level, and lo and behold I drove along that section of Knutsford Boulevard in peace. All it took was a couple towings at $10,500 apiece.
As I tootled past, smiling, it occurred to me that, contrary to what we may think about ourselves and what others may conceive us to be, Jamaica is a trainable society. We do not have to be so riotously ramshackle, so happily haphazard, in our dysfunctional driving, our destructive construction practices, our garbage non-disposal, our often intrusive partying.
DISCIPLINE WITHOUT FAVOUR
All it takes is the will of the authorities to enforce discipline without favour. And when the training period is over, painful as it might be, the lessons often remain.
Take the intersection of West King's House Road and Waterloo Road, which I use every school morning. About a year ago it was sheer chaos. Coming from Constant Spring Road and trying to get across the intersection was hell, as people coming from Upper Waterloo Road simply ignored the stoplight.
Then the police started handing out tickets to those who were still in the road when the light turned red. They did it for about four weeks and I remember missing them the morning of the triple police murder in May (at that intersection, actually). In fact, they have not been there consistently since then, but whether the police are present or not motorists simply do not block the intersection.
Of course, the process of instituting order in a situation that has been allowed to descend into a free-for-all can be fractious, as people feel they have the right to be careless and chaotic. There was the situation with the late fees at the University of the West Indies last year, when students were asked to pay their fees by a particular time, leading to deregistrations and protests. I am pretty sure that the students will take a different approach this year, like paying their fees on time or presenting their cases for an extension well in advance.
CAULDRON OF DISCONTENT
Further up the higher education fees pipeline, the offices of the Students' Loan Bureau were a cauldron of discontent, disgruntlement and disgust earlier this year, when the hordes descended on Oxford Road dead on the deadline. The Bureau's deadlines are well known and they issue public reminders, so no one has a credible excuse for being late. However, the SLB still has to hold a hard line and I am sure that those applying in the future will remember and more will be early.
Many times it is not only the big things, like the murder rate and rising prices, that give us a sense that things are out of control, but the smaller things, like cars blocking an intersection, a motorist tossing out garbage on the road (what happened to the anti-litter law?), a sound system pounding in a residential area at all hours of night (though in its application the Night Noise Act is highly prejudiced against reggae), a garage with cars being revved at your gate earlier than you care to get up.
We can not only enforce the regulations that make our society orderly; we can also train our people to act in accordance with the law without having to face the penalties again.
I remember being outside the courthouse in St. Ann's Bay for the count at that famous St. Ann by-election when the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) supporters, smelling victory, hollered, whooped and pressed the lines of JDF soldiers. Then, when it was time for the guys in green to move away, I heard one say: "Watch ya now, look how dem naa go come ova." And, sure enough, for a while after the soldiers moved, the rabid political hordes stayed in place where they had been when the soldiers had had their rifles ready, still hollering and whooping.
Call that the crash course in training the population.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
