Everyone Eating A Food.

“Man haf­fi eat a food”, not prop­er English , yet every Jamaican under­stand that it means every­one should have a chance to make a liv­ing. There is noth­ing wrong with that con­cept. In fact it is a noble con­cept, only thing is that in Jamaica it takes on a sin­is­ter and omi­nous mean­ing.  Eating a food  means a lot of things in our coun­try ‚beyond the noble notion of com­mu­nal bliss. It means tak­ing what some­one worked hard for at the point of a gun. It means get­ting a pay-check from Government for work not done. Payback for polit­i­cal loy­al­ty and foot sol­der­ing. Shocking yes ? Someone’s deci­sion to eat a food could decide whether you live or die. This start­ed just around 1972 when the think­ing of Jamaicans changed after they vot­ed Michael Manley into office. All of a sud­den the man­sions at the top of Beverly Hills in Saint Andrew were not there as sym­bols of inspi­ra­tion to be achieved through hard work. They became sym­bols of the rich’s greed and exploita­tion. The own­ers of those Mansions were no longer peo­ple to emu­late, but liv­ing exam­ples of cap­i­tal­is­tic exploita­tion, to abhor and hate. Our love affair with crime and crim­i­nals have had a long and sto­ried his­to­ry . We can pull our hair and bemoan the thou­sands of mur­der, each decade. But we lie and decieve our­selves if we deny knowl­edge of its gen­e­sis. We’ve sown the seeds of dis­cord , hatred, and anar­chy. Now we eat the bit­ter fruits of our labor. We can blame every­one for our mis­for­tunes. , the CIA the IMF, the Martians . I rather believe it’s IMF,it’s Manley’s fault.

P J Patterson

When a peo­ple who were used to work­ing hard and aspir­ing to great­ness sud­den­ly begin to envy those who achieved through the sweat of their brow they have a prob­lem. When they bought into the con­cept that those who worked hard , planned and accom­plished mate­r­i­al suc­cess are evil cap­i­tal­ists to be loathed ‚they have a problem.

Portia Simpson Miller

We bought into the con­cept of a social­ist easy way of achiev­ing stuff. No longer inspired by the con­cept of hard-work and edu­ca­tion as vehi­cles of upward mobil­i­ty ‚we are in trou­ble. Now the fruits of our greed, envy, and hatred have ripened, why are we sur­prised about the blood letting?»»