Sharon Wilson started painting professionally nearly 30 years ago, believing that there were few positive images of black people in the media at that time.Her works became instrumental in leading the local art movement to a new consciousness but more recently it’s been her writing that has got people talking.She started blogging about the Island’s escalating levels of violent crime, offering solutions for how we can all play a part in stopping the negative trend.The writings have been mass circulated via e-mail and Facebook; the artist has even opened her doors to dozens of people interested in talking further.She said: “When it went viral I started getting the letters from people who weren’t on my e-mail list and were getting it from other sources.“I was like ‘What is it about these posts that are creating this response, what kind of conversations are people having?’”In the first piece, entitled Nowhere to Run, she encouraged residents to take a look in the mirror and be honest with themselves about how they may be contributing to the problem.She described mothers, grandmothers and girlfriends who know their loved ones are up to no-good and say nothing as enablers.A classic case was the woman who allows her husband or boyfriend to bring drugs into the house as she preaches to her children that such behaviour isn’t acceptable.She also lambasted girls who spend their last dime buying designer items to impress their peers, when they haven’t paid their last month’s rent.Those individuals are living a lie — she said.Ms Wilson was motivated to write after hearing repeated talk about the Island’s problems in salons and other gathering places.Parents tend to detach from the issue when it doesn’t involve their own children, she said.She told The Royal Gazette: “I started realising there was this attitude that I would hear among people ‘what are they going to do to fix their problem?’ I thought, ‘No, what do we do to fix our problem?’”She continued: “It’s my belief there is nothing wrong with the children, the solution has to start with us. I mean the children are following the adult’s example; something has to be feeding the behaviours. It doesn’t just drop out of the sky.“It feels as though one day we went to sleep and everything was normal and the next day we woke up and we were hearing guns and people were getting shot and I think it left us reeling because we haven’t had time to adjust to what was going on.”She said we can no longer be reactionary but must go to the source of the problem to figure out what happened.“The newsletter was my attempt at doing that,” she explained.The daily negative influences we get from music and television aren’t sufficiently countered with positivity, the artist said.Instead of asking our children to behave differently, we need to examine how we ourselves behave, she said.“There’s a phrase ‘I have your back’. Does that mean I support you no matter what you do? There’s something wrong and sick about that.“If I see you going off the rails, I have to tell you that you need to take another look at that issue. That is what I expect from my best friend.”She said we all need to individually examine whether or not our behaviour is getting us the results we want. Though it’s easy to criminalise someone for their wrongdoings, we’ve all made mistakes, she maintained.“Your high is for cocaine, but mine might be shopping when I can’t afford it and I have to go around borrowing constantly and lying to cover it up.“Somehow seeing the behaviours in ourselves makes us a little more compassionate when we see it in others,” she said.Being honest with ourselves about our shortcomings also frees us from the shame and pain attached with that, she said. The artist admitted she wanted to “start a different conversation” so that the Island could examine behaviours without shame or blame and find solutions together.One of her pieces, A Place To Start, challenges residents to consider how their skills can be used to help heal Bermuda.We also need to stop pretending that we have it all together, she said.Pain is at the base of today’s problems, Ms Wilson said. Happy people typically don’t go around acting negatively.She encouraged families to take a break from all the technology and actually start having conversations with each other before our problems escalated.“I think we live in an age where we want to be more conscious of what we do. At some point we have to stop and ask if whether something we have always had or done is still working for us. That requires introspection,” she said.“I recognise that I am one voice, but we all have voices and I know that no-one can come and fix these problems but us.“Throughout Bermuda’s history we have always believed it’s someone else’s job to fix it and we bring in the experts from overseas. But the answer is with us and it won’t be something Government does, it will be a change that happens from the grassroots up.”An excerpt from Ms Wilson’s blog was printed in yesterday’s edition of The Royal Gazette. To subscribe to her articles e-mail sharonwilsonart@northrock.bm.