Dear Editor,

People are willing to give up their rights to get justice. In the end they will have neither their rights nor justice.

I despise the music of this guy (Tommy Lee), as well as that of most other dancehall artistes. I think laws should be enacted to retard the adoption rate of such music, such as a national rating system for singers, as well as actually making it an offence to publicly play music from any artiste who has songs that explicitly endorse violence, corruption or lewd acts. That way children won’t hear music from such people, even if one song is clean, because then they go on to listen the nasty ones.

The Mighty Sparrow sings about sex, but in his case you must already know of the acts then read between the lines. The way these guys sing, no leap of imagination is required.

In the meantime, the laws cannot be subverted, and our rights, even the rights of such people should not be violated.

They are entitled to a fair hearing, and they should not be held without reasonable evidence of a crime. We cannot abuse the power of the police force to compensate for our inability to detect and deter crime. Or else, very soon, the same power will be turned against the people.

I think Vybz Kartel should be freed of the charges, because the case presented strains credulity. But I wish we had laws that would immediately see him locked right back up for crimes against the decency of this country — unfortunately, we simply have no such laws to restrain freedom.

These singers aren’t the enemy, and never were. Our intellectually bankrupt, and corrupt, and pitiless leadership is. Music merely echoes the pulse of decay festering within this society.

Online Persona One