Would it make any difference if Jamaica left CARICOM? I asked 20 randomly selected people this question last week. They all shrugged their shoulders. It was like the old joke about ignorance and apathy - they didn't know, and they didn't care.

"To be poor is a crime, and only money can get you justice!" is a sentiment often voiced by ordinary Jamaicans. You hear many stories, for instance, of sexual abuse by 'big men' or brutalisation by state forces, which never get to court because of a lack of resources or connections. In such helpless situations, our human-rights groups sometimes represent the only hope for legal recourse.

BRUCE GOLDING, right now, must feel like a man who fell off a high building, and after plummeting downwards to seemingly certain doom, somehow finds he has landed on his feet unhurt. For the slings and arrows of the Manatt affair and the gut-wrenching upheavals of the Tivoli invasion are now paling beside the sharp drop in murders over the past three weeks or so.

'How easy it is if an example is set by Government of cruel conduct, for everybody to condone cruelty and for cruelty to become a national attribute.'

—Norman Manley, 1966

BETWEEN 1962 and 2009 Jamaica's murder rate went from 3.9 to 62.2 per 100,000 - perhaps the greatest violent death rate increase experienced by any country not at war. How did we get here?

The higher they climb, the harder they fall. No other Jamaican politician has so sanctimoniously disparaged opponents as Bruce Golding in his 1995-2000 National Democratic Movement (NDM) dispensation. He accused both the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and People's National Party (PNP) of practising old-time dirty politics and being irredeemably steeped in violence and corruption. Get rid of these dinosaurs and vote him into office, he urged, and his government would be a shining example of transparency and accountability that people could truly trust.

To those who even half believed their promise of a new approach to governance, this Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government has been a terrible disappointment. The Labour election manifesto turned out to be not worth the paper it was written on. As many charged in 2007, it's now sadly apparent that when it comes to Jamaican politics, there is truly no better herring and no better barrel.

Over 95% of people live in the land of their birth, and where you are born is a matter of chance. But who has not wondered what life is like in other countries and asked themselves if they would be happier or sadder elsewhere? . . .

IT ALMOST seems a waste of time discussing Jamaica's problems anymore. Everyone knows what they are and what the solutions are. But no one, from top to bottom, seems interested in doing what has to be done. . .

It's hard to write about Jamaica's financial problems after seeing the devastation in Haiti. Tens of thousands crushed under rubble, the injured and maimed with no medical care, the rest without food or water, and we claim to have worries?...

'There's no such thing as a free lunch!' is a favourite adage of economists explaining the reality that everything has a cost, and you can't get something for nothing. Now, it's true that success is usually a product of hard work. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it...