Not so long ago, a group of concerned clergy published ‘A Call for Unity’, an open letter urging their communities to obey existing Jim Crow laws.  Fortunately, the letter was smuggled into a Birmingham jail cell, where Dr Martin Luther King penned his famous response, since translated into 40 languages and transmitted around the world.

“There are two types of laws,” he wrote, “just and unjust.  One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’  Now, what is the difference between the two?  How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?  Any law that uplifts human personality is just.  Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Those eight white Alabama preachers, despite their best intentions, found themselves on the wrong side of history.  They were not evil men.  They were honest men with honest families, trying to keep things the way they were, the way they understood, the way they had been raised.  But that meant tolerating laws that degraded human beings, laws that would not — and could not — last.  Like the walls of Jericho, segregation statutes came tumbling down, taking us all closer to a world where people are judged by the content of their character.

Now it is our turn.

Important moments do not arrive with orchestral scores and Denzel Washington

You might not think we are living through a moment of similar impact, but important moments do not arrive with orchestral scores and Denzel Washington.  They look ordinary until, like fireworks, they explode into significance.

Professor Brendan Bain’s firing has ignited a wave of religious protests that have literally and figuratively made their way from the gates of the University of the West Indies to the heart of Half Way Tree.  Last week, an anti-gay rally drew 25,000 supporters and incredulous international coverage.  It was a call for unity, organized by honest clergymen, urging their communities to uphold the existing anti-sodomy laws.

If it sounds dangerously familiar, it’s because it is.  The prejudice of the Offences Against the Person Act is nakedly clear: “Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery…”, “any male person who, in public or private, commits… any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty…”  If you’re somehow having trouble seeing the bias, try substituting ‘female’ for ‘male’, or better yet, ‘genuine intimacy’ for ‘gross indecency’.

Yes, sometimes bad things happen — men, women, and children are abused, assaulted and raped.  But we do not ban owning kitchen knives or picking kids up from school or meeting a date on a Friday night.  Even though Amnesty International documents a ‘very high… rate of sexual violence against women in Jamaica’, there is no movement afoot to outlaw vaginal intercourse.  Why not?  Because it would degrade our human personality to do so (and it wouldn’t stop us from copulating).

If you do not meet the approval of the Christian authorities, you must live in the shadows

As it is, we live in a highly repressed society, with both sexes squeezed into narrow corridors of acceptable behaviour and appearance.  If you have dark skin, a belly, libido on Saturday and guilt on Sunday, you are the sine qua non of Jamaica.  But if you are of ambiguous descent, if you are bilingual or bisexual, if you are an atheist or an activist, if you use words like sine qua non, if your hair or clothes or gait or gestures or a hundred other social signifiers do not meet the approval of the dominant Christian authorities, you are implicitly stripped of your national membership and consigned to live in the shadows.

This is discrimination, pure and simple, and it is not worthy of a people who so recently escaped its wrath under a different name.  We should be ashamed of ourselves.  We should be rallying not to defend but to dismantle our buggery legislation, because it degrades the humanity of those it affects.  If the long arm of the law wants to reach into our bedrooms, it must grab hold of all of us equally, regardless of sexual orientation.  Anything else is unjust.

Rev Stevenson Samuels, chairman of the group of churches behind the Half Way Tree rally, claims to be “opposing injustice wherever it is, asking that the nation rise up for truth and rights… and that our laws be based on these premises.”  Indeed, that is a worthy goal, and one shared by the remarkable black American preacher who fought to secure a lasting dignity for his fellow men.  If we are to repeat history, let us do so in the measure of our compassion rather than the longevity of our condemnation.

We’ve all seen a rat in a glue trap.  An awesome and gruesome sight, watching a living creature struggle against the inevitability of death.  At first, it is certain of its escape, and tries to rip itself loose.  But that only entangles it further in the lethal paste.  Now the fear comes.  It sets to work gnawing away at anything it can reach — the glue, the plastic, its own limbs — desperate for freedom.  Then panic washes in, palpable and recognizable.  Using its last reserves of strength, it thrashes about — violently, recklessly, and in vain.  It is now hopelessly trapped, stuck in the tiny spotlight of its tiny stage until the final curtain falls.  And so it stops.  Its last moments are that of pathetic, paralysed terror, silent and still, unable to move, barely able to breathe, slowly succumbing to its exertions and exhaustion.

That’s life in Jamaica.

If you live abroad, Jamaica is disappointing.  You read online about the violence and shake your head.  On the phone with your sister, you hear about the crime and empathize, secretly thankful for the intervening distance.  You alleviate your nephew’s poverty, sending down supplies and urging him to come up for school.  You visit — briefly — and lament with your spouse the missed opportunities and downward spirals and how very sad and very bad and what’s the word, oh yes, disappointing it all is, from the safety of your dual citizenship.

We have visited anger and fatigue and disappointment and found them wanting

But we who live in Jamaica are not disappointed.  Disappointment would be a vast improvement in our outlook.  We would be overjoyed to be disappointed.  No, we are still working our asses off in the blazing-hot sun, watching our hands and feet get thicker and uglier each year.  We are still sitting in traffic with a metastasizing army of taximen who will surely jump the line in Heaven after they find themselves prematurely at its gates.  We are still afraid to go out too early in the morning, too late at night, in too large or small a group to too crowded or isolated a place, and certainly not in our nice clothes or new car.  We have visited anger and fatigue and disappointment and found them wanting.  Truth be told, we’re goddamn depressed.

In the Nat King Cole classic, “Mona Lisa”, he croons about an elusive woman: “So many dreams have been brought to your doorstep / They just lie there, and they die there”.  That’s Jamrock, a graveyard of dreams piled higher than the Riverton City dump, and twice as pungent.  Success is something that happens far away, and if it happens to us, we stand and stare at it in dumb shock, like a child greeted by a stranger.  Then we recover quickly, before other people smell it and come running.  Because success in our island is a rare and wondrous thing, not to be expected and not to be hoped for too fervently, nightly prayers notwithstanding.

Success in Jamaica is not to be expected or hoped for too fervently

Yet we feel even more private with our failure, as if the reason our dreams do not flourish in this barren wasteland is our individual gardening skills.  We come up with excuses and rationalizations, delays and procrastinations.  We plant more seeds, different seeds, better seeds.  We try shade and less shade and no shade, more water  and less water, fertilizers and dances and that thing we laughed at openly when it was first suggested.  To no avail.  Come Monday, we have the same job in the same office, with a different title and the same salary.

And so eventually we give up, for it is in the nature of depression to win a war of attrition.  Like the wretched rat, we stop fighting.  We lay down in the glue, and wait.  This is what you see when you walk the city — the vendors selling newspapers, the workers digging up the road, the nurses at the bus stop.  It looks like we’re busy, but we’re really just waiting.  We have been beaten — by the heat, the hustle, the humility of repeated failure.  The woman who answers the phone when you call, the man who is fixing your bathroom, the manager who runs your branch — all broken by a slavery greater than our capacity to withstand it.  We are a defeated people, born and living on a new kind of plantation, or as we like to call it — home.

Cancel the flights and contracts.  Bulldoze the stadiums, strip the uniforms and send home the players.  Take away absolutely everything that makes the sport the sport, and there would still be football in Sao Paulo tomorrow.  It might be a married couple, kicking an empty bottle down the street.  Or a ragtag bunch of boys, barefoot and sweaty, bruising each other with a tennis ball.  Or a group of older women, toned and tanned, playing keep-up on the beach.  Eventually, the familiar game would emerge, born anew out of reflex and restlessness.

It’s not just Brazil; it’s why football is so widely popular — at minimum, all you need is something to kick and someone to kick back.  In Jamaica, there’s no maximum — a scrimmage game can swell from two to ten to twenty to upwards of thirty men, lost in swirls of dust, the ball somewhere in the congested epicentre of insults, injuries and inflated egos.

The World Cup has those, too, but it has something else — the best players on the planet.  Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and dozens of other football phenoms are stretching their legs, waiting to razzle-dazzle the largest captive audience ever assembled.  Almost 200 million people will be watching each match, and for viewers, the bloodlust, nationalism and awe fuse into a powerful televisual drug.  Walk into a bank or bar with a TV and witness its power — all necks craned and eyes fixed in the same upward direction.

The Estádio do Maracanã could fit between the ambition and ability of most scrimmage players

With so many fans soaking up o jogo bonito, you’d think scrimmage would improve.  Nope.  Run onto the neighbourhood green this month at your own peril, as your friends try out the soaring passes, laser-guided one-twos and fancy footwork they see onscreen.  Needless to say, the Estádio do Maracanã could fit between the ambition and the ability of most weekend warriors, resulting in games where you spend as much time retrieving the ball as receiving it.

But even if Andrés Iniesta showed up underneath the guango tree with water bottle and car keys in hand, he would have to adapt to the constraints of Jamaican scrimmage.  Most fields are slanted, uneven, only partially grassed and dotted with a cornucopia of obstacles — gravel, pavement, flower beds, tree roots, water pipes, light poles and cow droppings.  The goalposts are stones, set two paces apart and permanently bridged by the slowest, largest or oldest player on the team.  There is no referee, no box, no centre spot, no corners and no lines — the field of play is delimited by nearby buildings and the stamina of the participants.

A game under these conditions bears only a vague resemblance to the one beamed via satellite.  Every arena in Brazil has seven interlinked high-definition cameras trained on each goal, giving the officials millimeter-precision with their calls.  At home, you could roll a ball directly towards the goal from ten feet out and watch it curl away like an errant putt.

The World Cup teams all use the same basic patterns of play, heavy on defense

Still, the World Cup can guide you to victory in your local fixture, if you know where to look.  Watch the 32 teams in the opening round-robins, and you’ll see the same pattern again and again — four guys at the back, four or five more in the middle, and one or two up front.  The strikers don’t run back to the keeper, and the defenders rarely run forward to the half-line.  If the opponents start to threaten, they are swarmed by the midfielders.

That simple strategy would be unbeatable in scrimmage, where every game is lost by an overcommitted attack.  Too eager to score, players run upfield and hang around, hoping for a fortuitous mistake.  No one wants to be far from the action, so more people pile forward, and the game becomes an oscillating series of mad dashes to protect wide-open goals.  It’s how early association football was played, too, and as Jonathan Wilson shows in Inverting the Pyramid, the whole history of the sport has been a slow accretion of players into defense, like a pane of glass thickening at the bottom.

Stars like Mesut Ozil and Luis Suarez may be tempting to imitate, but their dexterity depends on their less-flashy compatriots being in position.  What might seem like an individual achievement is actually a team effort in disguise.  So this weekend, as your friends don the jerseys of their heroes and take the field, try stealing the uncommon strategy of every World Cup champion — playing sensible football.

The world’s No. 1 sport takes center stage next week in Brazil, but No. 2 only relinquished it last week in Bangalore.  The Indian Premier League ended on Sunday, and the maharajah of cricket tournaments again brought the largest stars, crowds, brands and paychecks in the game.  A host of imitators have sprouted across the former British Empire, including our Caribbean Premier League, hoping to capitalize on the novelty appeal of three-hour fixtures.  Today’s top talent, like Chris Gayle, criss-cross the globe from one domestic T20 league to the next, racking up salaries inconceivable to the stars of even a decade ago, like Brian Lara.  To the casual observer, the game of cricket is doing very, very well, thanks for asking.

Lost somewhere at the back of this noisy, glitzy, profitable parade is the elderly grandfather of the game — Test cricket.  The five-day original is hopelessly anachronistic in an age of television, Twitter and twenty-over matches.  On international tours, two or three Tests are thrown in seemingly out of habit or obligation, with audience and players slogging through it like vegetables at dinner, anxious for ODI meat and T20 dessert.  But this is no elegy for white flannel.  Test cricket’s obituary has been in constant rewrite ever since its birth in Australia in the 1880s.  In truth, the money now flooding the pitch is as much tonic as toxin for the long-form game, subsidizing empty stadiums and leisurely play.

The real lament is for what happens beyond the boundary rope, in the stands.  The art of watching cricket is dying.  That might sound silly, with record turnouts everywhere from Sabina Park, Kingston to Sahara Park, Cape Town, and a satellite audience that keeps growing.  But the Faustian bonanza of T20 attendance has been a trade of quality for quantity, and in the exchange much has been lost.

The average T20 patron doesn’t have a clue what’s going on

For openers, the average patron at a Twenty20 match doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.  Every sport has its quirks and corners known only to the initiated, like the offside rule in football or club selection in golf.  But cricket is nigh impenetrable to an amateur, stuffed to high heaven with English jargon.  A leg-spin specialist can come around the wicket from the north end and bowl a short delivery on the offside, which the one-down batsman late-cuts between second slip and gully, beating third man for four, marked down as five runs because it was a no-ball.  That’s a routine moment, but one lost on most who find themselves at the stadium nowadays.

A crash course in positions and principles is just the beginning, however.  Twenty20 feels like a carnival — not the opulent samba of Brazil or iridescent soca of Trinidad but the generic, crassly-manufactured Jamaica Carnival.  The gameplay amounts to the cricketing equivalent of a home run derby, so to juice the excitement, organizers provide a smorgasbord of cheerleaders, giveaways, pyrotechnics and noisy distractions from the actual match.  The effect, from the bleachers, is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

This is anathema to true cricket-watching, whose rhythm is minutes and perhaps hours of restless quiet, sharply punctuated by the crack of the bat, the cartwheel of the stump, the roar of the crowd.  The echo of these sounds live inside you forever — any diehard fan has only to close her eyes and hear them, and suddenly a whole innings rushes back in glorious synesthesia.

Test cricket levels the playing field outside the playing field

Those who attend Test cricket are a dysfunctional family, joined in the certain knowledge that we have to live with each other for the better part of five days.  The morning drunk, issuing mellifluous, superfluous coaching advice as he traverses the walkways, is treated with a respect he finds nowhere else in life.  The legendary ex-player finds himself subject to diatribes and open disregard for his achievements.  This egalitarianism is promoted by the architecture — rows and rows of identical seats — a leveling of the playing field outside the playing field.  But it takes time to seep into your bones.

Cricket has never been about cricket.  To watch the game was to subsume oneself in the fabric of West Indian life — to see complete strangers break bread, best friends break apart, and grown men break down.  It was about waiting and waiting and waiting for what you want, and sometimes not getting it.  The modern game, all wham-bam-Spidercam, is about cheap instant gratification.  That’s why Test matches may survive yet.  Sooner or later, everyone wants their life — and their cricket — to mean something.

The dying sun flooded the sky with orange watercolour, and the boy watched his long shadow as he ran — it looked as if he were on stilts.  The air smelled of ash and the fritters frying behind the barracks.  His belly gurgled, but still he ran, past the low wooden buildings, past the three women preparing dinner, past the outhouse, heading for the sound of laughter.  He barreled into the clearing and stopped, a small cloud of dust like tiny fireworks around his feet.

There they were — twenty or so men and women sitting haphazardly around Mr Hunt as he read from a few dog-eared pages of newsprint.  His voice was articulate and sonorous, and the evening breeze slapped the broad wet leaves of the banana trees in mock applause.  As the boy approached, the old man paused and looked at him.  “And now,” said Mr Hunt, “let’s have a poem from young Oliver.”

Thus began the entertainment career of Oliver Adolphus Samuels, a métier spanning five decades and an estimated 3,300 performances, stretching from the plantation dirt of Tremolesworth, St Mary to the pinewood stage of Ward Theatre in Kingston and far beyond, along the way transforming a country hand into a national hero.  He is welcomed into Jamaican communities wherever they form — in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, London — not as a stranger or even a friend, but as one of the essential comforts of home, alongside bulla cake, spiced bun and Bombay mangoes.

Mr Samuels seems destined for a place alongside Bennett and Ottey, but what does that mean?

Unlike Bob Marley and Usain Bolt, who have been lost to the homogenizing firehose of global fame, or luminaries like Mary Seacole and Malcolm Gladwell whose island heritage is mere footnote, Mr Samuels seems destined for a place alongside Louise Bennett and Merlene Ottey in the gallery of in-betweeners — household names that mean nothing to foreigners and so feel like open secrets to be held especially close at heart.  But what is the nature of that secret?  What is the meaning of his resilient celebrity?

Mr Samuels’s stage persona is that of a pugilist teddy bear — full-bellied, full-throated, full-throttle.  He is unabashedly working-class, dismissive of rules and etiquette, a blunt instrument of deadpan malapropisms and equal-opportunity insults.  Part dad, part dud, neither savant nor servant, convinced of his dignity and comically apt to lose it, ‘Oliver’ is the quintessence of how we see ourselves, or like to see ourselves, or at the very least hope to see ourselves as Jamaicans — simple, plainspoken and authentic in a world of complexity, confusion and contradictions.  He’s our true north.

It’s a powerful archetype, which explains why his spirit inhabits so many of our male media stars — we keep reincarnating him in vessels like Volier Johnson, Winston Bell, Oral Tracey, and Alton Hardware (aka Fancy Kat).  More than any of them, though, it is Mr Samuels whose journey has tracked most closely with his homeland.  In a country with a million people in destitution, it is fitting that a boy who clambered out of rural poverty (with pit latrines where the humorist recalls “cockroaches playing trumpet on [his] balls”) became the man who found the knockout paunch.

The stability of Mr Samuels’s fame speaks to our arrested cultural development

But the stability of Mr Samuels’s fame also speaks to our arrested cultural development.  In the same diaspora cities he frequents, art is constantly in flux as new faces, technologies and movements displace old.  Not so in Jamaica.  We remain firmly shackled by the psychology of the plantation, where reputation is built on longevity over creativity, and change resisted rather than embraced.

Though Mr Samuels’s success is undoubtedly due to his superlative comic timing and hard work, a hidden part has been played by an industry and society heavily biased towards what it already knows.  This is why our theatre has decayed into irrelevance, and our country has declined into complacency.

Progress only deserves the label if it outpaces life itself; otherwise it is nothing more than the passage of time.  In watching the comedian from the riotous heyday of ‘Oliver at Large’, through his baroque collaborations with playwright Patrick Brown, to his current late-stage work, for better or worse we have been watching our nation age without advancing.  When we laugh with him, it is self-deprecating humour, but perhaps it should be tinged with the sadness of knowing that somewhere in St Mary, another young boy is running down a dirt path, with nowhere at all to go.

As an institution, marriage is on the rocks.  People are marrying less, and later in life, in both the developed and developing world.  One in nine Jamaican unions now end in divorce, twice as many as forty years ago.  The real failure rate is higher, since many couples separate without the legal rigmarole.  Of the dwindling remainder, at least half of spouses cheat, and one in three confess to being unhappy.  Finally, studies attest that most people feel worse about their marriages over time.

Not exactly a gold-ringing endorsement of wedlock.  On the contrary, all that misery suggests we should call the whole thing off.  Maybe matrimony has served its purpose, guiding us through some purgatorial middle stage of social evolution, from the savannah to the verandah.  To wit, the long-term decline in marriage is often linked to the rise in female education.  As women get higher degrees and financial independence, the thinking goes, they have less need for men — and marriage.  In country after country, from Argentina to Zambia, the data show more schooling leads to less schmoozing.

Except Jamaica.  Running counter to almost everywhere else, here you’re way more likely to find a mister if you have a master’s.  But our divorce rates follow the global trend.  What gives?  Why do marriages really fail?

The decline in marriage is often linked to the rise in female education

Before we answer that, let’s decide whether matrimony is worth saving in the first place.  Cohabitation is increasingly common worldwide, allowing partners to learn about each other, reap the benefits of proximity, share the burden of childrearing, and split with expediency, all without the aisle.  More Jamaicans are also choosing to live alone.  Aside from pleasing your earthly mother and heavenly father, good reasons to tie the knot aren’t obvious.

Cue scientists rappelling through stained-glass windows.  Thanks to long-running experiments, we now know that wedlock increases your life expectancy and decreases your risk of all kinds of diseases, from the common cold to cancer (compared to singles and cohabitors).  In addition, you’re more likely to finish grad school, earn a higher salary and have successful children.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but those benefits only accrue to satisfied couples.  So what’s preventing most married people from being happy?

Monogamy.  Huh?  Isn’t that the whole point of pairing off?  Well, yes and no.  Underneath our sophisticated seductions, we’re just primates in pants.  And while we use our big brains to make individual choices, collectively our animal instincts win out.  When it comes to monkey business, humans fall somewhere between gorillas, where one alpha male has all the sex, and chimpanzees, where everyone humps everyone else.  As columnist Dan Savage punned, people aren’t monogamous, they’re monogamish.

Our slightly polygamous nature — very roughly two partners for every mate — has always been fighting a losing battle against our strictly monogamous nurture.  In truth, every human society establishes some kind of unofficial outlet for sexual promiscuity — eg, slavery or prostitution.  The only difference in the 21st century is the number of (mostly) women who can escape relationships of infidelity, not the number of (mostly) men who indulge in it.  What’s more, it stands to reason that if we could invent a type of marriage that not only tolerated but embraced the reality of male and female desire, spouses would be largely content.

Our polygamous nature is fighting a losing battle against our monogamous nurture

That’s exactly what happens.  Partners who jointly engage in extramarital sex — a.k.a. swingers — report notably higher levels of emotional and physical satisfaction than their straight-laced counterparts.  An incredible nine out of ten describe their marriages as happy.  Unlike adulterers, they are vigilant about safe sex.  And outside their libertine bedrooms, swingers — pegged at 15% of unions — are ‘demographically indistinguishable from the general population’.  (If anything, they are less racist and sexist than the average John and Joanne — not least because they want to sleep with them.)

By right, matrimony and monogamy should be close cousins, not the identical twins we’ve made them out to be.  Our jealousies, fears, dreams and expectations of relationships are not innate but insidiously inscribed by Hollywood, Hallmark and the hymnal.  That might sound like hyperbole, but its truth is found in the widespread practice of open polygyny by many remaining indigenous cultures.  In short, it’s who we are.  The recipe for a normal marriage is simple enough — two lovers coming together in mutual trust and respect — but if you want the spice of life, try doubling up the ingredients.

In the Old Testament, Nehemiah convinces the Persian ruler Artaxerxes to let him rebuild Jerusalem.  But to get from Persepolis to Judah, he asks the king to write letters ‘to the governors beyond the river, that they must permit me to pass through’.  In the 2,400 years since Nehemiah’s journey, passports haven’t changed much.  Printed in bold blue letters on the inside of mine is a decree no more sophisticated than that of Artaxerxes: ‘The Minister of Foreign Affairs requests and requires, in the name of the Government of Jamaica, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.’

At least I don’t have to petition the Minister directly.  Anyone can travel under the full protection of the government, so long as she can afford snapshots, a visit to a Justice of the Peace, an hour in Half Way Tree, and J$4500.  While that’s a mere inconvenience for me, it puts a passport beyond the reach of the 1 in 6 Jamaicans who live below the poverty line, and effectively excludes many more who live payday to payday.  Still, to paraphrase the New Testament, the poor will always be with us (and unlikely to get a foreign posting), so what’s the real problem?

Forty years ago, Jamaica signed a United Nations treaty called the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which insists ‘everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own, [except for] restrictions… provided by law’.  Put plainly, unless you’re a criminal, no one should hold you anywhere.  The treaty effectively codified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes freedom of movement, into binding international law.  Has the Jamaican government, among others, violated our right to travel by charging for passports?

Have governments violated our right to travel by charging for passports?

It might seem like a moot debate, since the cost of a plane ticket dwarfs the passport fee.  If you can afford one, you can get the other.  But that doesn’t answer the question in principle.  If a street vendor wins a free round-trip to Trinidad, should he be denied the opportunity because he only makes, well, peanuts?  Should refugees have to find money just to get permission to leave?  Jamaican documents are still relatively cheap, but that may change — US and UK passports are three times as expensive, and Turkey and Lebanon twice as costly again, driven in part by the ongoing arms race in biometric data.  By contrast, Europeans can walk from Portugal to Estonia without showing papers, lowering their practical cost to zero.

It’s also worth distinguishing between visas and passports.  Visas are about entry.  In the Caribbean, we’re used to being denied access to North America, blue book or no blue book.  Though it might be unfair and absurd, governments are free to discriminate who they grant admittance — America is skittish about West Indians, Barbados about Jamaicans, Jamaica about Haitians.  That’s life.

Passports, however, are really about exiting — most airports and seaports require them regardless of destination.  Armed with passports, even the most rejected individuals in the world, like information liberator Edward Snowden, can find refuge somewhere — after all, there are 200 nations.  But without them, your poorest citizens are imprisoned within the ghetto of your borders, especially on an island like Jamaica.

Without passports, your poor are imprisoned within the ghetto of your borders

It wasn’t always thus.  Passports became universally mandatory as an outgrowth of World War I mistrust.  Before the 20th century, most people crossed borders freely, if at their own risk.  It’s this philosophy — that as a citizen of the Earth, you deserve to traverse it — that the International Covenant seeks to uphold.

So let’s say, in a fit of democratic zeal, we want to abolish the application fee for Jamaican blue books.  In fact, let’s get rid of all the upfront costs.  Just show up, and the Passport, Immigration and Citizenship Authority (PICA) will snap your photo, check your records and send you on your way.  But no matter the process, PICA has to cover its operational costs.  Where should the money come from?

General taxation would be worse than the current payment system, which at least burdens only travelers, who as a group are wealthier than non-travelers.  Better would be a levy that siphons money from frequent flyers and the well-off — for example, a departure tax on business-class seats or First World destinations.  Best of all would be a worldwide subsidy for border documents (The Nehemiah Project?), funded by the United Nations itself.  Developing countries could draw large portions if they agree to being monitored.  In that way, the humble passport — now accessible to all — could finally realize its potential, and put the mobility back into social mobility.

On October 30, 2006, Britons who turned to Channel 5 got an unexpected eyeful.  A man and woman were having sex on the telly.  Not movie sex.  Not simulated sex.  Real, unadulterated, bed-pounding, Negril-vacation sex.  No modesty was spared.  Tiny cameras and lights were strapped to the man’s erect penis, and inserted into the woman’s aroused vagina.  After a few minutes of this coitus abruptus, viewers watched from the claustrophobic confines of her cervix as his semen spurted and dribbled.

What was this frontal assault on the senses?  ‘A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century Sex’, an 8-part series presented by the aptly named Dr Catherine Hood, an Oxford lecturer and sexual health expert.  In a move that would make Jamaican religious conservatives faint en masse, it was broadcast over-the-air (on the British equivalent of our CVM-TV), free and nationwide, during the hallowed Christmas season.  When a few viewers predictably complained that it was “inappropriate [for] vulnerable young girls”, the English regulators kiboshed the objection, because the content ‘sought to inform and educate rather than stimulate or arouse’.

In fact, that was the whole point—to provide, at no charge, a frank and comprehensive sexual education for everyone.  Episodes covered sexual positions, STDs, homosexuality, swinging, sex amongst disabled and overweight people—essentially, the full range of modern erotic experiences as they really happen.  Britain’s openness, exemplified by its broadcasters, has paid off—their teen pregnancy rates have fallen to a 50-year national low.  Jamaica?  Three times higher, and climbing.

An open approach to real sexual education has lowered Britain’s teen pregnancies

Sadly, ‘A Girl’s Guide’ is off the air (unless CVM is interested).  But all is not lost.  There is another fount of carnal knowledge freely available to Jamaicans—internet porn.

Wait, don’t write the editor just yet.  I’m not advocating for mainstream pornography, the US$8 billion industry pumping out 50,000 movies a year.  Quite the opposite.  There are few things unhealthier for our cinnamon population than watching dehumanized blonde women with artificial proportions get paid to fake orgasms.  Those staged bonkfests are more eradication than education, undoing all the progress we’ve made in congress.

Another caveat: allowing children unfettered access to the Internet is always a bad idea.  Just as you restrict their movement in the real world, parents should monitor their kids on the web, and for the same reasons.  (And if you think your angels won’t find the online red-light district, think again—70% of children now stumble onto hardcore content as young as age 11.)

But adults and maybe even adolescents should deliberately find the elephant in the bedroom—crowdsourced sex video sites modelled after YouTube.  (Like YouTube, thousands of people upload their home movies, but with fewer pets and more privates.)  These ‘tube’ sites, which actively resist piracy and exploitation, have shot up in popularity, handling more data than Hulu and more traffic than Netflix.  With good reason.  Visit one, and you open a browser window into the vast, beautiful, irreducibly complex landscape of humanity.  In other words, you see regular people having regular sex.

Amateur video sites allow Jamaicans to see regular people having sex without fear of being shamed

This is huge.  Having sexual urges, and questions about how to satisfy them, is part of being human.  But asking those questions in Jamaica is often fraught with peril.  Peers mock, parents blush, pastors condemn.  Inexperienced adults are left stranded, afraid to reveal their naivete.  Married adults are expected to perform lovingly and dutifully, despite a culture that raised them to be alternately chaste and violently sexual.  Older couples are supposed to live in the space between barrenness and boredom.  And to add insult to impotence, masturbation is usually verboten.  Our religion and morality leave precious room for the birds and the bees to fly free, no matter your age and stage of life.

Public videos of amateurs satisfy that natural curiosity while reinforcing a positive body image and a tolerance for diversity.  By definition, no money changes hands.  The camera is generally a tasteful distance away.  And the participants, as you would expect, are more focused on what they’re doing than what they look like doing it.  Tall and short, thin and fat, young and old, black and white and every permutation in between—this is the human race at the starting line.

The result, even more than ‘A Girl’s Guide’, is not something pornographic but rather psychographic, capturing how and where and sometimes why people make love.  And if the Brits are any example, watching all that ordinary copulation can be an extraordinary contraceptive.

The painted motorboat cuts its engine, and we drift up the mouth of the narrow river.  The seawater darkens, settles and becomes a jade sheet of glass.  On both sides, spindly mangrove fingers weave themselves into a thick barricade, as if to remind us we’re only visitors.  A white egret glides into view, dips low over the water and finds its nest, hidden in the silty forest.  Way above our heads, three black crows sail on the warm thermals, keeping watch.  Gentle ripples betray an unseen crocodile, annoyed at being disturbed.  And a tree crab sidles along a fallen branch.  This is the Portland Bight, home to the Goat Islands.

Twenty-five kilometres east as the crows fly, another ecosystem is full of life, this one featuring cranes without beaks and whales of iron.  The Kingston seaport is the busiest in the Caribbean, close to the Panama trade routes and blessed with a large natural harbour, the perfect habitat for container ships.  Conditions are so favourable that the port has enjoyed near-constant expansion for decades, a boon in our stagnant economy.

These two neighbouring environments — one organic, one synthetic — are connected by a thread running halfway around the world.  China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) is building a regional operations port, and our government wants the investment.  (The courtship isn’t new — CHEC is building Highway 2000, despite a record of unethical behaviour and the objections of the former Contractor-General.)  And last year, they found the perfect spot for their new venture — Goat Islands.

Goat Islands is caught between the economists and the ecologists

You can predict what’s happened since.  Politicians and businessmen, led by Minister Omar Davies, have argued the economic case — US$1.5 billion injection, 10,000 jobs, 21st-century competitiveness, etc.  Environmentalists, led by author Diana McCaulay, have argued the ecological case — endemic species, hurricane buffers, irreparable damage, and so on.  And the rest of us, uninformed and apathetic by default, have written off the battle as a lost cause.

Here are the facts.  The Portland Bight wetlands, lakes and forests are a Protected Area (PBPA) under the Natural Resources Conservation Authority Act.  In addition, the Fishing Industries Act created three Special Fisheries Conservation Areas in its waters.  It is a Ramsar site by treaty — ‘a wetland of international importance’.  Birdlife International considers it an Important Bird Area (IBA).  And the isles themselves are game reserves thanks to the Wildlife Protection Act.  With its shores, shallows, reptiles, fish and fowl all wrapped in overlapping layers of legislation and protection, the Goat Islands are as off-limits for development as it can possibly be (given nearby human cohabitation).

But money doesn’t grow on endangered West Indian mahogany trees.  The shipping industry is immense, profitable and predictable, keeping pace with the world economy.  And a major bonanza is beginning.  Cruise ships, container ships, and oil tankers are only as wide as the locks on the Panama Canal.  That single measurement, known as Panamax, has been a giant restraining rubber band for a century, but it’s about to pop.  Panama will open a brand new set of locks in 2015, and the rest of the world is scrambling to capitalize.

Ports everywhere will need bigger cranes, to reach across the wider decks of post-Panamax ships.  Harbours, including ours, will need to be expanded and deepened, since larger ships sit lower.  It’s a gold rush for seaports like Kingston Container Terminal, and firms like China Harbour Engineering.  Crane assembly?  CHEC.  Harbour construction?  CHEC.  Seafloor dredging?  CHEC — they’re the second largest dredger in the world.

We need to balance moving quickly against the cost of paradise lost

China, who owns CHEC, is willing to drop US$1.5 billion into our coffers because it stands to make way more obscene fees in the coming years.  But we can have our lake and compete, too.  There are other sites for the port complex (the original proposal was Fort Augusta).  In determining the fate of Goat Islands, we need to balance the benefits of moving quickly against the costs of industrialization (see, literally, Beijing’s unbreathable air) and of paradise lost.

Precisely due to unrelenting pressure to develop, virgin sanctuaries will only become rarer and more valuable in the future.  Ecotourism is growing by 25% annually, far outpacing the rest of the tourism industry, fueled by the increasing scarcity and innate appeal of nature.  If the government is genuinely interested in Jamaica’s long-term prosperity, the smart money may be on leaving the crocodiles to swim in peace.

When I signed up on February 22, 2005, TheFacebook.com had one purpose (and one million users).  There was no Like button, no App Center, no News Feed.  It was just a directory, a digital phonebook of young college faces and contact information.  Instead of coding your own gaudy website on GeoCities, Mark Zuckerberg’s fledgling company gave you a handsome profile in royal blue, with links to your schoolmates.  That was it—you couldn’t even add photos.  It was simple, straightforward and useful.

Fast forward.  On its tenth anniversary, Facebook is the most populous service in human history (1.3 billion users, or 1/6th of the planet).  It allows you to share everything, absorbing a staggering 15 million pictures, 200 million links and 400 million messages in 70 languages every single hour.  And it’s everywhere—installed on all your devices, embedded in all your favourite sites.  By any measure, an unstoppable global hegemon.

Except for one thing.  I’ve stopped using it, and if you have life goals, so have you.  The ubiquitous social network has devolved into a sewage stream of shameless clickbait (You Won’t Believe What This Supermodel Did!), derivative videos (LeBroning et al), and banal comments on banal events—in other words, a complete waste of time.

Anything of interest on Facebook is buried in an avalanche of notifications

Anything of interest is quickly buried in an avalanche of notifications and invitations.  (Joseph likes Mary’s photo!  Judas gave a life in Candy Crush Saga!  Peter and Paul are now friends!)  Far from strengthening our social networks, Facebook has reverted us into obsessive, narcissistic tweenagers, endlessly preening and passing notes in some vapid virtual classroom.

I’m not alone.  Despite its unprecedented scale, Facebook is hemorrhaging millennials by the millions, the very demographic it initially bewitched.  This is what economists call a leading indicator.  Like birds responding to barometric pressure before a hurricane, this defection of youngsters suggests a coming crisis for the Big Blue app.

Mr Zuckerberg sees the danger.  In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, the photo-sharing service with 100 million users.  In February, it acquired the chat service WhatsApp for an eye-watering US$19 billion (roughly Jamaica’s GDP), even though it has its own Messenger app.  In addition to spending its way into continued relevance, the company’s recent efforts deliberately hide their parentage—like the smartphone app Paper, which integrates your News Feed into a magazine layout.  The subtext seems to be a tacit admission that its core product—the Facebook social network—is broken.

To fix it, let’s take a peek under the hood.  Facebook assigns a score to every post depending on its kind (photo, status update, and so on).  It also bumps the score, like a biased professor, if the post is from someone you share with often.  Then it populates your feed with the high-scoring posts.  But even with bright engineers constantly tweaking the formula, a visit to Facebook is still an exercise in skimming and scrolling, as you separate the wheat from the chaff yourself.  And there’s a lot of chaff.

Reddit shows you its best content right away, every time you visit

On the community news service Reddit, by contrast, users directly vote other users’ posts up and down (somewhat akin to clicking Like buttons).  The content most valued in individual networks, or subreddits, bubbles to the top; the least valued sinks to the bottom.  If a post is boosted enough, it bumps onto a global list, which Reddit calls ‘the front page of the Internet’.  Each user sees that page and whichever subreddits interest her.  In other words, Reddit shows you its best stuff right away, every time you visit, and scrolling yields diminishing returns.  Zero chaff.

To regain its mojo, Facebook needs to overcome its moral queasiness and borrow Reddit’s meritocracy.  Introduce a Dislike button, and treat our upvotes and downvotes not as independent actions, but as collective referenda on each other’s posts and photos.  Of course, your feed will still reflect your interests and relationships, but judgment on individual posts will be swift, ruthless and efficient.  Instantly, Facebook would stop being that thing you do when you should be doing something else, and start being genuinely useful again.  But if you’re undecided whether this is a good idea, share it on Reddit.  One way or another, in a few hours you’ll have your answer.