Opposing Sensibly...

If the People's Partnership Government were to declare war on cancer tomorrow, Sunity Maharaj would find a way to defend cancer, Keith Rowley and Faris al Rawi would suggest that, by targeting cancer more people are now going to get it, and David Abdulah would say that cancer is good for healthy societies in the long run.

What am i spoofing?

That these people are so consumed by their agendas and zeal for relevance they repeatedly throw the issue out with their biases and oppose for opposing sake time and again.

Not every thing must be politicized, not every policy attacked in the name of opposing for opposing sake. At some point we must be able to be mature enough as a nation to come together to confront the real issues, the negatives that plague us if we are ever to improve to where we want to be.

Take crime as an example. This government through this Minister of National Security is fighting a war against crime on a broad array of fronts never experienced in this country before, and putting statistics and specifics into the national conversation creating by extension an entire generation of armchair criminologists.

We have 'found' the link between state contracts and the organized crime of the ghetto gang culture now that it has been exposed and brought to heel. We 'stumbled upon' the link between the ridiculous number of illegal aliens living among us, people with needs who, unable to get meaningful employment due to their lack of documentation would be left with little choice but to engage in criminal activities, yet when the Minister raises this at a regional level he is accused of 'muddying the waters' of integration. How can defending your nation against unlawful invasion be considered an attack against integration?

Or when the idea of terrorism and zealotry is raised, when links to globally sponsored terrorism are exposed, cheap politics convolutes the thing to the point that when Jamaica deports a notorious son of this soil long linked to radical extremism and who led a bloody assault against this nation's Parliament, politics allows this issue to become anything other than what it is and the individual given mind space to rewrite history and recast himself as some sort of national leader.

How do we grow past this?

Did we take Westminster from the British only to make a joke of it and a laughing stock of ourselves?

Yes the Opposition's job is to oppose, but not for opposing sake but to offer the public real alternatives so that informed choice could determine elections. What we have here is instead is a mockery of that, where opposition forces only have to malign and ridicule, where issues and policies are cast aside and personalities and reputations attacked mercilessly in the name of opposition, leaving the people more confused and less informed, and even more jaded where politics and politicians are concerned.

Surely at some point we must want more. More information. More representation. More service from these elected officials regardless of on which side of the aisle they sit.

If the Minister of Food Production tells us that food inflation is being reversed we should want to know what that means, what are the implications to prices and what should we expect to encounter on the grocery shelves. But by engaging in ad hominem politics that targets the Minister and ignores the issue the information gets lost and the public left exposed to the unscrupulous among us simply because they still have no idea what a peeled back food inflation rate means.

We need to desist choosing wrong for our misconceived right reasons. Wrong can only be wrong. Religious fervor is great until it picks up a gun to shoot you for disagreeing. Political fanaticism is fantastic, until it creates a newspaper built on lies designed to sensationalize character assassination in place of real news. The media itself needs to come up higher. We as a people must avoid becoming ensnared by the desire for more power that we abuse what little power we have. We are all here for a relatively short time, and when given an opportunity to affect public life we must do so with high ideals and a desire to leave this nation better for us having been here. As the old saying goes, when we set out to slay monsters we must make doubly sure that we ourselves do not become monsters along the way. The opposition has a role, but they need to figure out what that means in this context and start contributing to the national development if they want to be even considered as relevant to the equation.