Bad End of Year News

On the news today I heard that Jmaica has accomplished a first -- we now have the highest per capita murder rate in the world.

For the past few years, we have flirted with the title, behind South Africa and Colombia and not including countries in which there is a recognized war of some kind.

To Jamaicans, this will bring no small sense of embarrassment. We are a proud people, and will go to lengths to explain that by and large bad things don't happen to everyone in Jamaica, all the time. We'll also say things like "these things are happening everywhere" and "I felt more scared in New York" to try to escape the essential truth.

The essential truth is that we have the "title" because we have made things this way, ourselves, with only a little help from non-Jamaics. In conscious and unconscious way, we have contributed to this "accomplishment."

Our only job now is to figure out how we did this, and continue to do it. If there were only one thing each of us could discover, it would make all the difference.