"Take the first step, and your mind will mobilize all its forces to your aid. But the first essential is that you begin. Once the battle is startled, all that is within and without you will come to your assistance."
Robert Collier
"You're in the midst of a war: a battle between the limits of a crowd seeking the surrender of your dreams, and the power of your true vision to create and contribute. It is a fight between those who will tell you what you cannot do, and that part of you that knows / and has always known / that we are more than our environment; and that a dream, backed by an unrelenting will to attain it, is truly a reality with an imminent arrival."
Anthony Robbins
"To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting."
E. E. Cummings
"The hardest battle you're ever going to fight is the battle to be just you."
Leo F. Buscaglia
Good Evening ladies and gentlemen wherever you are this Friday evening, I beg this Friday the last of the year, that you lend me your ear, and hear my voice when you see these words, for I write to you now as warrior weary worn and forlorn in the midst of a battlefield of everyday life. This has been a year like no other, I've watched the year begin with a barrage of bullets, and watched a bullet start the year in Paradise killing Jerome "Gully" Morgan, and travelling almost similarly from the literal level and taking on spiritual form to kill the very spirit and vibe and essence of a community, a bullet that has travelled throughout Mobay and wreaked untold havoc and mourning and snuffed out hopes, dreams and lives. But before finishing its year long tour of Mobay, on the way back it makes a tour de force of sorts in Paradise accompanied by a demon army to take one more life in Paradise, that of one Cedric Thorpe. And sometimes I wonder if I predicted all this... at the start of the year when I wrote an article January 13, 2007, The Neverending Battle, that got quoted in the Observer, it read...
"Bam bam bam bloiy bloiy bloiy chk chk chk thoom thoom pieee pieee blam balm bookam bookam.no amount of onomatopoeia could convey to you the grand gun orchestra that played in Norwood, Gulf, Glendevon, Canterbury, Albion and Gully (all inner-city communities of the city of Montego Bay, Jamaica) to commence the New Year. Literally the year in St James started with a BANG!
At the stroke of midnight December 31, 2006 or the morn of January 1, 2007, I was at the yellow night owl's outpost in Paradise, Glen Skeng's shop, only to see the whole Paradise pull to a halt and I watched as multitude of people stopped what they were doing to come outside and listen to the barrage of bullets in what seemed like gangsters singing their own anthem. I watched people listen, and listened as well to gunshots on rapid from 12 (midnight) to 12:30 am and I counted somewhere in the region of near 500 rounds and can only imagine what I missed. The year has begun, the garrison has spoken."
Compound a year like that with serious political upheavals, escalating murders, police killings, fatherless children, dying communities, urban decay, poor environments, deteriorating surroundings, pollution, global warming, MONSTER INFLATION YEAR, escalating oil prices, cost of living off the chart, young men and adolescents becoming killers and crack-heads, girls selling their bodies for KFC, phone cards and maybe cash sometimes, beggars on every corner, corrupt politicians, and now doesn't the future look really bright and promising. Do you understand why I am worn do see the world with my eyes now? How many lives do you know have been snuffed out this year huh? How many of your soldiers have gone by knives, bullets and car crashes? I not about you... but let me tell you, this year I've seen too many, more than I feel healthy, social and functional human beings need to see.
The talking heads on television and the radio-heads will continue to jibber jabber about one love and other generic tokens of love and try to reminisce on the "good" old days. But the problems that afflict Montego Bay like some crippling cancer won't be solved by speech but serious resolve, by serious SOULJAHS ready to stop playing hypocritical games, to stop laming up in the Gideon, to stop palavering on corners round the clock, to start improving the world around them, starting from there room, beautifying the room, the house, the yard, the community... to start looking to make small changes that will sum up if you are willing to look beyond instant gratifications, to take pride in small battles and small victories, and to know an to take faith in the fact that other soldiers are working, soldiers who are building better worlds and brighter lives, soldiers not caught up in frivolous and trivial vanities and idle pursuits, soldiers who need more soldier s of substance, not "fren tief" who will cripple his own parri's enterprise, more loyal women, who don't seek to solely take from her man's pocket but "boots him" then. Women soldiers too, who won't be in the dance while baby at home starving, in the prettiest clothes while, baby look shabby, women who will not simply open their legs on the basis of finances or hype, women fit for the war, sound minds and sturdy body and steady intellect, keen minds and pure hearts... that's what this battle is calling for, if we don't have soldiers like that then the city is lost... the communities are lost, the nation is lost... others have done it... are you prepared to do it?
The battle to change a nation, to salvage a people is started, with me, and many others I don't even know who too, have woken up to the same demoralising life as myself, to lies and pointless tradition, to a sea of corruption... so now I ask... what are you doing in the battle, in the Armageddon, in these days... are you making the world better or are you just another "MTV cable TV Cosmopolitan living in a bubble corners idling vagina peddling drug abusing rap music and alien culture junkie and zombie"? Are you making your world better (and I don't mean financially) are you making THE world better... if not then "yuh nuh fit fi the Gideon" and "to how the race a run its gone be bitter..." to end with a quote from the Gangster for life himself... Mavado. Till next year... If I make it till then!
Yannick Nesta Pessoa
http://yahnyk.blogspot.com
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com
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