07 May 2006 15:47
the only thing you left me when you left me was no choice.people are always bashing country music, but how can you lose when you have lyrics like that?
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i've talked a number of times about "how bad things are" here in jamaica. in reality it's not nearly as dangerous here for me as a whitey.
using some round numbers 1600 people were killed in Jamaica last year. i think the estimated 2004 census showed a population of 2.6 million (we'll ignore the tourists since i didn't hear of any getting killed last year). that's roughly one in 1625 people who were killed on the island last year. sounds like a lot, but i wouldn't be surprised if your chances of getting killed in a car crash in the US are close to that. regardless, a 25yo black male living in any of the gang-riddled, don-controlled, politically charged ghettos of kingston or spanish town has a greater chance of violent death by numerous orders of magnitude than myself; a 25yo white male living in an upperclass neighborhood on the north edge of kingston.
the greatest danger to myself comes by driving to work through the mountain view community (along with thousands of other upperclass kingstonians each day). but i'd face the same amount of danger by driving through compton in LA or through various portions of washington DC or any other major US city. the fact is that i feel conscious of greater danger in the states than i do down here because i get the impression that violence there is much less discriminatory than it is here where being white and staying out of both the ghetto and politics ups your chances of survival greatly.
...and as a christian i am confident that i don't have anything to worry about in the long run. time for a less morbid subject.
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"i can make an impact by flying."
i was reassuring my disperser that i didn't feel worthless to society in my job as a pilot (he was trying to convince me to become an engineer). he failed, however, to catch the double meaning (literal and figurative) of that particular sentence. jamaicans as a whole i've noticed don't seem to appreciate wordplay all that much (or sarcasm for that matter). --which pretty much decimates any attempts at conversational humour i might make. chiapanecos on the other hand continually delight in little word plays (especially after i've accidentally substituted nueve for nuevo yet Again).
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