Orville W. TaylorHURRICANE WILMA grew to Category Five with a needle-sized eye. This meant that she is a tight hurricane with very powerful sustained winds over a very small area. With those dimension she is doubtless a dangerous woman.
Interestingly, Wilma, measured from the lowness of atmospheric pressure around the eye, was the strongest tropical cyclone in recorded history, besting the previous record of our own Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. Despite the imposing evidence from atmospheric scientists, a few meteorologists, beholden to large corporations from which they receive grants, reject it.
Hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific Ocean have been increasing in intensity and frequency during the last few years. This includes a devastating one reaching China curiously named 'Long Wang,' which was unusually large for an Asian storm.
This year, we had record
numbers of both and in the Atlantic, we have completed the list of names even before the
season ends. What the corporations and the governments they support deny is that the increase in industrial emissions, especially those based on fossil fuels, has destabilised the earth's atmosphere and precipitated the increasingly freakish weather. Yet, since changing to 'healthier' production is expensive, no one is accepting responsibility even in the face of impending global destruction.
Blame and responsibility are like a ganja spliff being circulated among corner youths when the police arrive. No one wants to own it. Nonetheless, while I can understand delinquent young men wanting to evade legal consequences of their actions, I do not afford such a luxury to our public leaders in civil, civic and corporate society. There is a Jamaican proverb of, I believe, West African origin that goes, 'Di higher di monkey climb, di more 'im expose'.
Last week, under full media scrutiny, the Mayor of Kingston, Desmond McKenzie, led a campaign to rid the streets of New Kingston of illegally-parked motor vehicles. A staunch defender of the law, often for short media bursts, he has on more than one occasion expressed the notion that no one is above it. Ensuring the adherence to traffic laws and making New Kingston's 'hip strip' accessible to vehicular traffic is commendable. Therefore, I pick no bones here. However, the towing of motor vehicles in the presence of drivers is reprehensible, reproachable, and ridiculous and it even deserves another set of 'Rs'.
NO-PARKING ZONES
A few months ago on my talk show, which is monitored by all political parties, the senior superintendent of police in charge of traffic, indicated that vehicles may only be towed in the
presence of the driver if operating illegally. This includes absence of registration, insurance and certificate of fitness. It does not incorporate fully functional vehicles that are parked in no-parking zones. In the same vein in which the mayor was uncompromising when persons with unlawfully erected signs on their properties pleaded ignorance, he cannot cloak himself under any idea of being ignorant of the law. The requirement to know the law is even more binding on public officials and the policemen/ women who accompany them in enforcing it.
Nevertheless, it is human to err even when attempting to do right. My problem is that the mayor could be building a perhaps undeserved reputation of being unrepentant even when clearly wrong. Earlier this year, he made erroneous statements regarding the University of the West Indies' (UWI) sewage emission. Even when he was given the opportunity to do the gentlemanly thing and correct the misguided statement, he doggedly stood by his original utterance. His response in The Gleaner report on Thursday last regarding the illegality of the seizure of motor vehicles is inadequate. Quoted as saying "Take up the matter with the police," he skirts away from the issue.
ADMIT ERROR
Whatever his political persuasion, this is another chance to do the manly thing and admit error. Even President Bush is finally learning to. "You are doing a good job, don't let it be tainted with the perception of blind arrogance."
Speaking of blindness, I am listening with 'a keen eye' to the debate by present and past politicians speaking 'around' the crime issue instead of talking straight. Security Minister Peter Phillips, at a recent function, revealed the blindingly obvious truth, known to all black sociologists across the hemisphere and the globe, that 75 per cent of violent criminals and their victims are from the 15-29 age group. They are ostensibly black, undereducated and unemployed. This is the same age group that was most vulnerable to the appeal of armed political violence in the 1970s.
To compound the problem, a startling story was published in September about armed schoolboy gangs running extortion rings and committing other acts of violence against their peers. Ask any teacher in any of the metropolitan schools with a large black or Hispanic population in the U.K. or U.S. and he or she will tell you that, school searches, police, and surveillance cameras are all part of the arsenal in attacking violence there. A
former teacher in a violence-prone St. Catherine school remarked that "there is a sense of hopelessness among students involved in gang activities."
What has been well known to the colonial masters and the earlier politicians cannot have been lost on the present leaders. That is, a young black man without opportunities is even more dangerous than the present bird flu threat.
I don't care much for political objectives but I strongly defend national needs. I want to see a set of senior politicians including past prime ministers and prime ministerial hopefuls being honest about where the crime problem began. Until we do that, hypocrisy will abound with no solution arising. Let's not pass the spliff around, let's put it out.
Dr. Orville Taylor is senior
lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at UWI, Mona.
