Quiet ‘billioneering’ unfolding

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The brazen and vacuous argument that Jamaicans should be dispossessed of their beaches because some citizens litter or behave with indiscipline – or what one prominent blogger and reader of these pages referred to as unruliness by ‘creeps’ – is a lazy, entitled, un-Jamaican surrender, neatly dressed up as pragmatism.

By this flawed logic, we should privatise Half-Way Tree to solve traffic indiscipline or close our public schools because of the misbehaviour of a few. Civilised societies do not respond to disorder by dispossessing the public; they govern better.

What is currently unfolding on our coastline is not environmental protection, but rather a quiet ‘billioneering’. The commons are being enclosed, sanitised, and resold to the very class from whom they were recovered. While enforcement of standards is undoubtedly necessary, these are duties of the State, not valid pretexts for exclusion.

To argue that citizens are too “nasty” to enjoy their own shores is to cross a dangerous line: it recasts a birthright as a privilege. Once a people accepts that their access to nature is contingent on “good behaviour” as defined by the gatekeepers of capital, everything else becomes negotiable — including dignity itself.

The State must fulfil its duty to govern the commons for the benefit of all, rather than facilitating their quiet disappearance.

DENNIS MINOTT

Port Antonio, Portland