I am so fed up of the so called well ed­u­cat­ed peo­ple in our so­ci­ety who have noth­ing bet­ter to do than let Machel Mon­tano keep them from a good night's sleep? I mean come on peo­ple enough is enough!SO WHAT if the Prime Min­is­ter takes Machel to Lon­don, she al­so took Denyse Plum­mer isn't he de­serv­ing of this? The PNM gov­ern­ment took Machel to Cu­ba and no­body said any­thing.This young man rep­re­sents our coun­try on a lev­el that 95 per cent of our cit­i­zens can't even come close to do­ing (my­self in­clud­ed)? It amazes me that with every­thing else go­ing on in so­ci­ety to­day that Machel is the main top­ic on these peo­ple's minds.

These ma­ture peo­ple in our so­ci­ety seem­to have noth­ing bet­ter to do than con­stant­ly bash this well ed­u­cat­ed, pro­fes­sion­al young man. Some of us seem to have for­get­ten that he is, in­deed, quite ed­u­cat­ed.What if the Prime Min­is­ter had tak­en the Shiv Shak­ti Dance Group, Ravi B, Rik­ki Jai or Adesh Sama­roo then we as a peo­ple would have cried dis­crim­i­na­tion, isn't that so? You can not please mankind.What both­ers me the most is the stu­pid ques­tion of "Machel is be­fore the court?" Again SO WHAT!...Machel is be­fore the court on a sum­ma­ry of­fence charge..its not kid­nap­ping, traf­fick­ing, rape, em­bez­zle­ment, it is a sum­ma­ry of­fence. Learn the law of the land..he is not and has not been con­vict­ed of a crime.

In­stead of en­cour­ag­ing this young man to con­tin­ue push­ing for­ward we are try­ing to bring him down for what? To please our egos? At the end of the day, if this is achieved, would you then be able to get a peace­ful night's rest; would you then have more mon­ey in your pock­ets, will the price of food go down? NO!...So in­stead of en­cour­ag­ing the young peo­ple in our so­ci­ety, (which is so crime rid­den by so many of our youths) to take a page out of Machel's book, we are try­ing to bring him down.

We are try­ing so hard to bring down one of our so­ca icons who trav­els this globe fly­ing this coun­try's flag so high, on­ly to be con­demned by the same peo­ple and coun­try he is rep­re­sent­ing?I am not telling any­body's child to try and be like Machel, all I am sim­ply say­ing is the same en­er­gy we ap­ply to bash­ing Machel, let's use it to push our youths in the right di­rec­tion. Lets try and save the ones that have not al­ready cho­sen that path and lets try to en­cour­age the ones that have to choose an al­ter­na­tive to crime.

Machel Mon­tano, Karene As­che, Patrice Roberts and Aaron Dun­can are some of them.So peo­ple please, please lets us move away from this top­ic and let Machel and the rest of the artistes that so proud­ly dis­play their love for our coun­try con­tin­ue to do the won­der­ful job that they are do­ing.

Tri­cia A Grant

Mt Hope