By John Anthony
The foreign taste and foreign itches that Jamaicans have developed partly through the efforts of our low self-esteem, history and of the foreign media I call the Hollywood Trojan Horses, now have the common housewife screaming for deliverance as flour prices jump and dance upwards.
Why in a land where we do not grow wheat, do we have a lust and taste for wheat flour? When I was a boy we had breadfruit falling off trees (ripened and rotten)! Why do we not have the taste for breadfruit flour? Breadfruit trees used to be easy to grow and required low maintenance and so the associated costs of production should not be prohibitive unlike yam or cassavas which have to be replanted annually.
But when a brainwashed perception (Wheat flour is the best) develops from a bias, it becomes entrenched and almost immovable. The local housewife and citizenry are as much to blame for rising wheat flour prices because they lusted after the wheat flour, developing American agriculture and did not demand breadfruit flour and so lead to the development of Jamaican agriculture. Hard choices in building a nation often means changing our tastes and preferences before crises hits. We should have developed a taste for breadfruit flour decades ago!
FOOLISH JAMAICANS NEED TO BE TAUGHT WHAT NATION BUILDING IS We thought nation building was watching cable TV and eating American apples. We thought that nation building was getting a multiple visa. We thought that profiling and styling was nation building. Or we thought it meant overstaffing Air Jamaica or using short cut methodology. Oh foolish people no one ever taught you that nation building means zipping up your pants and going home to your wife? No one ever taught you that nation building was changing your foreign taste to local one so your own farmers could develop local agriculture? Nation building means switching from wheat flour to breadfruit flour and setting a goal to plant five million breadfruit trees by 2010! Nation building means cancelling your cable TV and starting a college fund for your children and grandchildren.
WE WILL NEVER DEVELOP OUR ECONOMY AS LONG AS WE HAVE ENTRENCHED FOREIGN TASTES AND ITCHES Low self-esteem people make a low self-esteem nation and LOW SELF-ESTEEM PEOPLE MAKE THE BEST CUSTONERS! All smart marketing experts know this. Low self- esteem people will spend their money on cell phones and not on a college fund for their children. They will buy American grapes not invest in their bank accounts and cable tv before setting up a retirement account. Low self-esteem persons make the best consumers because one of the most potent drivers of human interaction is the desire for recognition and importance. These persons will go into debt and to great physical lengths to feel important and style and profile to catch the eye of onlookers.
In addition, we are destabilizing our economy by demanding cell phones when hundreds of thousands of citizens do not even need them, building the wealth of Irish and British companies who transfer our wealth potential into their bank accounts in London and Dublin, while they masquerade as Jamaican entities! Do we need Garvey to rise from the grave to open our eyes? He is not dead but alive! Open your eyes and behold him! In the future when inevitable price increases arrive we will scream then as we are screaming now when all along we should have been saving our money!
