IT IS hard to tell why some news stories hit harder than others. We have developed the frightening capacity, a survival skill, really, of taking in the day's murder tally and other death stories on the evening news while happily eating dinner and relaxing with family. And if 'we nuh know dem, den a nuh nutten'.

The crash of the alleged ganja plane in the Faith's Pen area last Monday morning with the death of its two occupants was news taken in stride. The apparent reprisal shootings in the area 48 hours later was one of those news items which hit hard. In recent trips to Montego Bay, we have stopped in the Faith's Pen area. We 'know' them. The 'informa-fi-dead' culture strikes again. And as the nation celebrates its 47th anniversary of Independence as if it were the 50th, gallons of tears are flowing in Faith's Pen and across the length and breadth of this wonderful country. As we commemorated freedom from slavery, 13 people were murdered over the Emancipation Day weekend, in a land increasingly in bondage to criminal violence.

Not just the traditional inner-city areas, which even the Government seems to be willing to leave to their own devices, but more and more of the country, including safe, peaceful places like Faith's Pen, have been brought under the fist of the terrorists. For terrorism it is. Areas are silenced and controlled by the exemplary killing of people labelled 'informa'. According to the news, the people of Faith's Pen, joining much of the rest of the country, have gone "tight-lipped" in the face of the brutal tragedy which has overtaken them.

Reprisal shooting

Frankly, I hadn't given the plane-crash news story a second thought until the reprisal shooting. The police should have. This newspaper reported: "The police said they had intelligence the plane was to pick up a shipment of compressed ganja when the crash occurred." They should not have said that. But even if they had not, the ruthless terrorists know that they just need to label and kill a few people - whether or not those people were involved with any intelligence - to 'lock down' the area and zip up all mouths.

The police arrested four men, trumpeted their success, and then left the people of the area unprotected and wide open to attacks by terrorists. These people now have the powerful incentive provided by invasion and violent death to seek to protect themselves.

And the easy-going, laid-back, friendly ethos of Faith's Pen as a famous rest stop may have been shot away forever. Every young man stopping to order ackee and saltfish and roast yam will now be held in suspicion. Some boy may have lost his innocence and is now resolved to avenge the death and maiming in Faith's Pen and to protect his community. Another beautiful piece of Jamaica eaten away by crime.

But on page two of The Sunday Gleaner, the day before the plane crash, there appears Janet Silvera's investigative feature on the street church conducted in Montego Bay by Sold Out Ministries. Paul Blake and his wife Dorrett have chosen to give up careers as a cabaret singer and banker, respectively, and 'walk on the other side of the road' to minister to the most downtrodden and marginalised of the society, including the street people of Montego Bay, who receive not only spiritual assistance, but help to put lives back together.

This spirit of sacrificial generosity, sharing and caring is so very Jamaican. Outsiders have not failed to notice this. So many people, themselves in hard-up circumstances, are willing to help others from the little they have. But while we celebrate the extended family and the village still attempting to raise the child, Jamaicans are extra-ordinarily carefree and careless in producing children, many of them to 'box 'bout', most of them not having any father attachment. Rampant father hunger, as Esther Tyson alluded to in her column, 'Strong families, strong nation', last Sunday, may be at the heart of many of our social dysfunctions, which are hobbling the potential of the nation.

Most creative people

We must be among the most creative people in the world, and despite negative elements, we have a rich musical heritage. But this holiday season, a large number of citizens will be tortured by loud, blaring music, night and day. ramshackle lawlessness is so characteristically Jamaican. The right to do as we please is the first law. So in another traditionally quiet rural town, this time, the quaintly named Woodlands in south Manchester, a man was fatally shot in the back of his head, allegedly by one member of a group of policemen giving a gun salute at a pre-Independence dance.

The news report gets even more bizarre. The parish police chief told the media, "We understand that when the police went to the dance (after reports of gunfire), the DJ took the mike and told the persons involved in the gun salute to cease because the police were there to turn off the music." However, the information is that one of the policemen who responded to the reports, joined in the gun salute, as the other individuals involved were other policemen. It was then that a middle-aged man, Errol Allen, was shot in the back of the head, with his daughter, recently arriving from overseas and seeing her father for the first time in 12 years, also at the dance.

As I have discovered, we don't even need a Noise Abatement Act. I don't know if my ears are fooling me, but the police seem to be now doing more to enforce the act. Sound systems in places where my ears have been dreadfully assaulted seem to be toning down generally, and certainly after hours. But long before any Noise Abatement Act, the Towns and Communities Act, which could well be called the Good Neighbours Act, was in place with a string of provisions protecting the rights of members of the community from assault by others. Everything from noise to garbage, from waste water to odours, was covered.

A land of extremes

Jamaica is a land of extremes. Visitors find it the most fabulous place on Earth. And we tend to be fiercely protective of our visitors and extraordinarily hospitable and generous to them. But Canadian tourists were deliberately shot at and were fortunate to escape with their lives when they wandered into an inner-city community, driving themselves from Montego Bay to Kingston. As we approach 50, as Errol Allen in the backwoods of south Manchester was doing when a gun salute killed him, we need to give careful thought to how to accentuate the positive and reverse the negatives.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.