I have been harsh with my comments about Jamaica lately. I
totally agree with the New Prime Minister Bruce Golding when
he said that "Jamaica is too rich to be poor".

I was having lunch with two colleagues last week from Korea
and France and they were quite surprised when I told them that
Jamaica is a third world country. I began to think about the reasons
for our debilitating social and economic conditions and came up with
two main reasons, bias and lack of transparency.

It simply breaks my heart to see that for a country's who motto is
"out of many one people", classism and differences in race,wealth
and religion have served as the driving force of social depravity.
I have often used that motto to embrace diversity in New York but then
I look at how it's being used in my country and I wonder if we even know
what that motto means.

I think we've missed the purpose of the biblical story called the tower of
babel. It's the  on the old testament where some people were building a tower that was suppose to get them closer to God. In the middle of the project they got separated by language bariers and hence were unable to  finish the project. Maybe your pastor or sunday school teacher told you that that was how the project was suppose to end. But I want you to think about this with me for a minute. Isn't the goal of any human being or society suppose to be getting closer to God?

The story basically shows that we can use differences to deter us from a goal or we can use them to build stronger societies. It's the same with ecomomic development.

Lack of transparency manifests itself in many forms and is probably the
underlying cause of the violence among other things that cripples our country. We basically have people saying one thing in public but doing another behind closed doors. And don't point your finger. Most of us are guilty of this.

My goal in 2008 and for the rest of my life is economic growth and social well being. I believe that if one lives their life on these basic premises then one can influence the direction of a whole country or somewhere else in the world in which they live.

I have been harsh with my comments because it angers me and and this is the kind of anger that facilitates change.

Are you angry?