I awoke this morning with an emptiness inside me that was, I believe, representative of the general mood of the population.

Apart from my usual stock of email from political tribalists which in itself is a sad reflection of our love for gods who no longer love us, there was little to cheer the soul. Each person whom I encountered had a tale of woe to relate to me, and as large as I believed my heart was, where its size failed to meet that of the pocket, even the listening had to end as I chose to flee to save some of me for myself.

Let me begin with one young man, 21 years old, a smiling, handsome fellow, never been to school. Between reform school and 21, he had been incarcerated three times. He barged into a conversation I was having with three men. “Anybody can gimme a cigarette?” he asked.

I surveyed him quickly then said, “Youngster, yuh doah have ‘please’ inna yuh mout?”

He turned to me and said, “Wha!” It was lost on him. It was while engaging him in conversation that he told me of his life: mother, overburdened with mental problems, walking the streets in the small district where they lived and loudly cussing the demons which appeared only to her. I turned to him and asked, “What were you locked up for the last time?”

He smiled broadly, “Mi rob a man. Tek some money off a him.”

“Why?” I asked foolishly. “And please, could you just stop smiling?”

The twinkle was still in his eyes as he answered. “Mi did just waan some money. Mi neva eat from mawning an mi did ‘ungry.” He smiled again. “So mi just use mi knife and push it ‘gainst him neck and tek him tings.”

Someone gave him a cigarette and as I stared at him I saw “iredeemable” printed on him. He was like a child playing with badness and could not see that it would eventually lead him towards his own destruction. If he survived another two years, he would harden and be another criminal nightmare, crippling and encumbering a country already overburdened with social ills.

One of the main factors holding back this country is that not many among our major ethnic group, that 95 per cent called “black”, believe that the social deck of cards is set in their favour. The fact is, the majority of our people are trapped here. Those who could leave got visas and did just that. A significant majority of those left behind are in that status because they were ineligible for US or British visas.

So, with the majority of us here not being fully committed to this country’s success, it should come as no surprise that Jamaica is in the drifting state it has been in for decades. In recent months, however, the mood of depression which has crept loudly into the soul of many Jamaicans is inching ever so close to critical mass because it appears that the ship of state is adrift.

Then there’s this other one. Her hands and face were pockmarked with nasty-looking, blackened skin eruptions and it was no secret that she was in the full throes of AIDS. I had met her years ago when she was trying to convince me that her 14-year-old daughter needed more than a mentor. That totally broke off the contact. Two years later the news came that the same daughter, now 16, attending high school and doing well, was pregnant. Then she found out that her “sicky, sicky” state was HIV/AIDS.

“Are you taking your drugs?” I asked. She nodded yes, begged me $100 and as I gave it to her I instinctively backed away because she had an uncontrollable flow of saliva running down her lips. As I left, I mentally placed her somewhere outside of my thought processes.

The prime minister has declared that the previous antagonisms between Tivoli and “Jungle” are no more. Kudos for this must go to Eddie Seaga and Omar Davies. But if we are to believe the rest of Golding’s placement of Tivoli, we should expect to see him and his family living there tomorrow.

When a struggling man from the ghetto makes it big, either through education, entrepreneurship, illicit drug-running, or he becomes a star DJ, does he remain in the ghetto? No. So why is Golding looking backwards?

Unless it is upper St Andrew, all of our members of parliament who represent impoverished constituencies live outside of those constituencies. Which is essentially why only physical infrastructure is ever improved. They have no vested interest in changing the mindset of their constituents because it is that mindset which delivers the vote.

In the wider society, our political leaders remain physically aloof from their constituents, so they deny their eyes and their ears the daily dose of a desolate country and the cries of hunger from a population fully convinced that little that the government says has any meaning to them.

A man marries a woman after she secures a divorce from her husband. They are very much in love with each other. Two years into the marriage, cracks appear. It appears that the man was not, after all, the good breadwinner that he claimed to be, and his sexual prowess was more PR than actual.

So, what does the man do? Two years later, he finds reason to blame the ex-husband for his own manly failures.

Very few people are interested in hearing Prime Minister Golding blame the PNP for our present ills. If the PM had set that train in motion four months after the 2007 September win, any new revelations of the PNP’s ills while in government would have been made more palatable by the momentum carried from that time.

The population therefore believes that the government has given up on finding creative solutions to our economic problems, cannot reasonably explain away the delays in settling the IMF agreement, and through its security minister it has no new ideas on stemming the murder rate. What it wants to do is reopen the wound (which was never there) on the PNP’s governmental omissions of two years ago and back, because it has no real answers to give us now.

People take their cues from their leaders. If we sense that the leadership is confounded and is, in essence, saying, “Den a wha unnu waan wi fi do!” many of us will just drift from home to work, from work to home and care little about anything else other than our immediate brood. That is close to terminal for a country.

I know it. It stares me in the face every day.

observemark@gmail.com