Jamaicans Unwittingly Give Thieving , Incompetent Politicians A Pass With (whataboutism)

You ever feel exas­per­at­ed and just ready to throw up your hands in defeat at some of the things which hap­pen in Jamaica?
I mean inso­far as the respons­es from the author­i­ties are con­cerned?
Okay, so it is not just me rant­i­ng and raving.

Here are a few exam­ples of what I am talk­ing about.
How on God’s green earth can peo­ple be pil­fer­ing oil from Petrojam with­out some­one in author­i­ty know­ing and is held account­able?
How is the pub­lic bus com­pa­ny for years able to lose mon­ey through pil­fer­ing and no one is ever held respon­si­ble?
How are politi­cians able to steal tax­pay­ers mon­ey feath­er their nest and no one is held account­able?
Seriously, how can a gang of com­mon punks ter­ror­ize a neigh­bor­hood with­out the author­i­ties unleash­ing the secu­ri­ty forces to exter­mi­nate them?
How come when they even­tu­al­ly pass a law to rem­e­dy a prob­lem the prob­lem-cre­ators are already well ahead of the new law?
Why would a piece of leg­is­la­tion intend­ed to fix a prob­lem be stopped to get input from the per­pe­tra­tors the law is ini­tial­ly intend­ed to address? 

The sad real­i­ty is that Jamaica, like any­where else in the world have inter­est groups with deep pock­ets and licky-licky politi­cians will­ing to do their bid­ding.
In many cas­es, the politi­cians are deeply con­flict­ed as they are oper­at­ing in dual roles as leg­is­la­tors and crim­i­nals.
And so regard­less of what laws are passed, they end up being win­dow dress­ing. They nev­er quite seem to address the press­ing issues they were intend­ed to address.
The fact is that there are pow­er­ful inter­ests which are quite com­fort­able with the sta­tus quo.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the con­se­quences are dire. What’s more shock­ing is that peo­ple have placed them­selves in blocks from which they expend their ener­gies defend­ing the wrongs their par­ty boss­es do.
The strange irony is that though they defend these crocks in their par­ty of choice they receive none of the ben­e­fits of the ill-got­ten spoils.

Jamaica is a mere 4’411 square miles and a pop­u­la­tion equal to that of Chicago Illinois.
Chicago is one of America’s most pop­u­lous cities. Jamaica, on the oth­er hand, has most of its pop­u­la­tion crammed into the Kingston and Saint Andrew area, Saint Catherine and in and around Montego Bay and the oth­er met­ro­polit­ian cen­ters.
Jamaica’s moun­tain­ous ter­rain ren­ders large swaths of the tiny coun­try large­ly unin­hab­it­ed or at best sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed. (See the Island’s cock­pit coun­try)

So let us do a lit­tle deduc­tive rea­son­ing.
But for the lit­tle band of crim­i­nals who would run into the Wareika Hills in the ’80s and ear­ly ’90s before we elim­i­nat­ed them, the aver­age punk mur­der­ing peo­ple are lazy lit­tle bitch­es who do not want to get their hands dirty.
They are so lazy they don’t even both­er to clean the expen­sive high pow­ered weapons they have.
Many of you have seen the images of the weapons filled with rust recov­ered from these piti­ful lit­tle punks.
Those doing the killings are not liv­ing in the moun­tains of Wareika Hills, they aren’t even will­ing to stay in the bush­es like the Joel Andem gang once did.
So that means one thing, they are liv­ing among you.
How then can it be so dif­fi­cult to find these blood­thirsty crea­tures and erad­i­cate them from the equa­tion?
Oh wait, I for­got about a fun­da­men­tal fact, the secu­ri­ty forces must nev­er ever tram­ple on the human rights of these demons.

As Jamaicans, we expend much ener­gy on (whataboutism). “Whataboutism” is a phrase I coined to respond to the con­stant non­sen­si­cal atti­tude of many of our peo­ple.
“People get killed every­weh”.
“A nuh ungle jume­ka peo­ple a ded”.
These state­ments are week attempts at demon­strat­ing patri­o­tism.
I nev­er quite under­stood how deflect­ing from the grue­some mur­ders and the shed­ding of inno­cent blood equates with patri­o­tism.
The sil­ly notion that peo­ple who talk about the killings are not patri­ot­ic is beyond inane. Any talk about killings in America when the killings in Jamaica is broached makes it appear that the aver­age per­son in America is cool with the mass killings in their coun­try.
So by that met­ric if the rest of the world walks off a cliff it is per­fect­ly fine for Jamaica to walk off the cliff as well.
How absolute­ly asinine.

The fun­da­men­tal essence of my argu­ment is that Government can and must do a bet­ter job of deal­ing with these issues in this tiny coun­try which is no more than the size and pop­u­la­tion of an American city.
Politicians can­not dip their grub­by lit­tle sticky fin­gers into pub­lic funds and get away with agree­ing to pay it back on the rare occa­sion that they are caught.
No one is above the laws, I do not give a rat’s ass whether you have a Dr. Ph.D. PM. or MP before your stu­pid name, if you break the laws you must be treat­ed the same way as every­one else.
Agreeing to pay back what was mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed is not enough if you take what is not yours or mis­ap­pro­pri­ate resources under your con­trol it is a crime.
If you par­tic­i­pate in enjoy­ing the pro­ceeds of an improp­er use of pub­lic resources at best you are incom­pe­tent and should be shown the door.

“Whataboutism,” is the sor­ry sim­plis­tic capit­u­la­tion to thiev­ery and mur­der.
The oth­er par­ty did it, so its okay if our peo­ple do it.
How ridicu­lous is it to take that posi­tion, to sur­ren­der to graft and cor­rup­tion because some­one else did it.
It is the very same con­cept of accept­ing the over 1600 grue­some mur­ders each year because of course “peo­ple gets killed every­where.”[sic]