When Abroad Jamaicans Obey Laws/​lack Of Rules At Home Encourages Lawbreaking

Legislators can write the best bills with the best research data and when those bills are vot­ed into law they may end up hav­ing only a mar­gin­al effect on that nation’s progress.
That is so because Governing is a pact between those who gov­ern and those who are gov­erned.
If the peo­ple refuse to be gov­erned by any rules and the Government acqui­esces to that sort of low-lev­el anar­chy, it is only a mat­ter of time before the entire thing erupts into a conflagration.

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

A few days ago I wrote the above arti­cle in which I bemoaned the lack of account­abil­i­ty in Government(par­ty-neu­tral).
This I believe is hav­ing a debil­i­tat­ing effect on the nation’s abil­i­ty to curb the run­away vio­lent mur­ders and return to the rule of law.
On that note, I would wish to asso­ciate myself with an arti­cle which appeared in Wednesday’s(Jamaica Observer) writ­ten by Elizabeth Morgan a spe­cial­ist in inter­na­tion­al trade and pol­i­tics.
In a bril­liant syn­op­sis, Morgan wrapped the fol­low­ing in her lead para­graph.

You leave home to tack­le the may­hem on our roads with fear and trem­bling; in the mod­ern, sophis­ti­cat­ed ten­e­ment yards you are afraid to talk to neigh­bors who are invad­ing your space with rau­cous behav­ior; you encounter rude and crude peo­ple in dai­ly activ­i­ties; men turn pub­lic spaces into pub­lic toi­lets expos­ing them­selves to all; there is no respect for self or any­one else; cor­rup­tion and crime have over­tak­en the soci­ety. Discipline and pru­dence are out the win­dow. Selfishness and fol­ly reign.
 http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​/​i​n​d​i​s​c​i​p​l​i​n​e​-​a​n​d​-​j​a​-​s​-​d​e​v​e​l​o​p​m​e​n​t​_​1​5​1​966

It is not often that an arti­cle of this qual­i­ty appears in the local papers which slices straight down the mid­dle and address­es the burn­ing issues of the day.
She did so with­out the pre­dictable (BS) and nuances we have become accus­tomed and numb to.
I have con­sis­tent­ly argued that we may have lost the gen­er­a­tions liv­ing now but there is no rea­son that we can­not get back to the basics.
There is no rea­son we can­not begin the process of incul­cat­ing val­ues, respect, and love into our chil­dren from the for­ma­tive years.
God, fam­i­ly coun­try are good prin­ci­ples on which to raise our young­sters, good peo­ple make good com­mu­ni­ties, good com­mu­ni­ties make good coun­tries.
A three-minute read on a social media thread reveals the lev­el of dys­func­tion in the minds of the peo­ple.
The lev­el of igno­rance and fer­tile space for wrong­do­ing is stun­ning. This did not take gen­er­a­tions to become a real­i­ty it took only a cou­ple of decades.
If we want to have a coun­try, now is the time to begin revers­ing this malignancy.

Two days ago a young woman, a vis­i­tor to the United States came into my busi­ness-place. She would be leav­ing the coun­try in about two weeks so she want­ed to have cell phone ser­vice for the remain­der of her stay with­out pay­ing a lot of mon­ey.
Her friends or fam­i­ly mem­bers had obvi­ous­ly tak­en her to a com­pa­ny store to get ser­vice which cost her (a vis­i­tor), over eighty dol­lars per month(US$80), a sum which rep­re­sent­ed well over a hun­dred per­cent cost increase com­pared to what she could have sourced in my establishment.

Unfortunately for her the estab­lish­ment where she pur­chased the device and ser­vice had no time for her so her fam­i­ly mem­bers brought her to the .……[Jamaican store to fix her prob­lem].
She told me what she want­ed, but lied about the type of account she had unwit­ting­ly signed up for.
In seek­ing to get the req­ui­site infor­ma­tion in order to be of help to her she became eva­sive and com­menced talk­ing over me. 
So I told her in an [unusu­al­ly] calm voice that she should take her phone and her­self back to where she pur­chased it if she was going to talk over me and make demands.
She stopped, looked into my eyes long enough to real­ize that she was out of options and I was dead seri­ous.
I was even­tu­al­ly able to give her ser­vice on the same device for much less of what she was ini­tial­ly pay­ing per month.
This brought a big smile to her face. She thanked me and told me “yu too per­fect.”!
Insisting that she con­duct her­self in a respect­ful and dig­ni­fied man­ner, in her eyes is per­fec­tion. More stun­ning­ly, Perfection is a pejo­ra­tive, a neg­a­tive.
Crassness, coarse­ness, rude­ness, dis­re­spect, bad man­ners are the aspi­ra­tional tenets Jamaicans now aspire to.
It is what gets them noticed.

In the years in which I have writ­ten for this site, I have like a bro­ken record spo­ken out at the indis­ci­pline, which has tak­en over our coun­try.
Not only have I bemoaned the break­down in the rule of law, but I have also con­sis­tent­ly point­ed to the need to get back to insti­tut­ing respect and basic man­ners in our homes.
I have point­ed to our pub­lic insti­tu­tions from the par­lia­ment on down The coarse dis­course, cor­rup­tion, graft, and theft is reflec­tive of a wider soci­etal rot which is lit­er­al­ly stunt­ing the growth and devel­op­ment of this pris­tine lit­tle Island. 
The thing which offends me most are those peo­ple who live abroad and have to con­duct them­selves accord­ing to the laws of their adopt­ed coun­tries but revert to hooli­gan­ism as soon as they land in Jamaica.
This has got to stop. The gov­ern­ment must stop equiv­o­cat­ing and pass laws with seri­ous con­se­quences for law­break­ing.
There is noth­ing wrong with hav­ing tough laws, if peo­ple do not want to be neg­a­tive­ly impact­ed by them they will obey them.