Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to your editorial of January 31, 2014 entitled "This barbarity must end! Get rid of the scum!" I have argued for some time that we have to take a more cerebral and less emotional and reactionary approach to the problem of crime. The difficult and inconvenient truth is that the root causes of crime lie within us, our society and our people.
Sadly, we have allowed ourselves to become a people who revel in aggression, intimidation and vulgarity. Instead of vilifying and maligning the proponents of such behaviour, we embrace them. When our politicians on both sides of the aisle watched political violence rise, thus plunging Jamaica into one of its darkest and most shameful eras, we remained largely silent. When many of our citizens shamelessly plundered and looted businesses during the chaos following Hurricane Gilbert, we laughed and looked the other way. When our musicians infiltrated our airwaves with their crude and violent lyrics, we rewarded them with our patronage and our money. We granted them media interviews and splashed their photos across our newspapers. We elevated them to celebrity status and made them role models for ourselves and our children. Some of our pseudo-intellectuals even defended them. "They're just reflecting the society," they said.
We allowed terms such as "bad man", "don man", "killa", "gyalist", and "gangsta" to enter our lexicon as terms of endearment. Silently we watched as our families fell apart, as our men and women were marginalised, and as respect for our traditional pillars of the society slowly eroded. Slowly the fabric of our society has been unravelling. And yet we have done nothing. Were we too blind to see or just too foolish to understand that there would be consequences?
Additionally, many of us have allowed ourselves to become too indifferent to the cries of the poor and disenfranchised. Why bother with them when we are ourselves doing OK? Few of us seem to realise that the little boy we chase away from washing our motor vehicle windscreens at the stoplight will, in a few years, be a fully grown man and, without some type of intervention, could soon be slinging a deadly weapon rather than a squeegee. We have abandoned the poor, leaving them trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and despair.
Of course, not all criminals are from the bowels of the poor, nor are all poor persons destined for lives of crime. But few can challenge the powerful nexus between poverty, desperation and criminality. Today, therefore, the responsibility for rehabilitating our society is not that of the police force or even the Government. In any event, they lack both the ability and the resources (human and material). It is our responsibility. Collectively we now need to slowly begin to right the ship by correcting our core set of values, principles, attitudes and behaviours. The urgency of now demands it. We need to begin rejecting violence, aggression and vulgarity in all its forms, especially in our music and our politics. We must change how we raise our children, particlarly our boys who must be groomed to become responsible husbands and fathers. We must also look at how we treat each other. We may never be able to love each other unconditionally, but we should at least learn how to respect each other. Importantly, we must also learn how to respectfully disagree, recognising that a diversity of opinions, ideas and behaviours strengthens our society.
Most importantly, civil society needs to redouble its efforts to help the poor and disenfranchised. When the poorest among us can also enjoy lives of relative decency, then the wealthiest among us will no longer need to seek refuge in gated communities.
Handel Emery
handelemery@hotmail.com
Truly, the barbarity must end!
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I am writing in response to your editorial of January 31, 2014 entitled "This barbarity must end! Get rid of the scum!" I have argued for some time that we have to take a more cerebral and less emotional and reactionary approach to the problem of crime. The difficult and inconvenient truth is that the root causes of crime lie within us, our society and our people.
Sadly, we have allowed ourselves to become a people who revel in aggression, intimidation and vulgarity. Instead of vilifying and maligning the proponents of such behaviour, we embrace them. When our politicians on both sides of the aisle watched political violence rise, thus plunging Jamaica into one of its darkest and most shameful eras, we remained largely silent. When many of our citizens shamelessly plundered and looted businesses during the chaos following Hurricane Gilbert, we laughed and looked the other way. When our musicians infiltrated our airwaves with their crude and violent lyrics, we rewarded them with our patronage and our money. We granted them media interviews and splashed their photos across our newspapers. We elevated them to celebrity status and made them role models for ourselves and our children. Some of our pseudo-intellectuals even defended them. "They're just reflecting the society," they said.
We allowed terms such as "bad man", "don man", "killa", "gyalist", and "gangsta" to enter our lexicon as terms of endearment. Silently we watched as our families fell apart, as our men and women were marginalised, and as respect for our traditional pillars of the society slowly eroded. Slowly the fabric of our society has been unravelling. And yet we have done nothing. Were we too blind to see or just too foolish to understand that there would be consequences?
Additionally, many of us have allowed ourselves to become too indifferent to the cries of the poor and disenfranchised. Why bother with them when we are ourselves doing OK? Few of us seem to realise that the little boy we chase away from washing our motor vehicle windscreens at the stoplight will, in a few years, be a fully grown man and, without some type of intervention, could soon be slinging a deadly weapon rather than a squeegee. We have abandoned the poor, leaving them trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and despair.
Of course, not all criminals are from the bowels of the poor, nor are all poor persons destined for lives of crime. But few can challenge the powerful nexus between poverty, desperation and criminality. Today, therefore, the responsibility for rehabilitating our society is not that of the police force or even the Government. In any event, they lack both the ability and the resources (human and material). It is our responsibility. Collectively we now need to slowly begin to right the ship by correcting our core set of values, principles, attitudes and behaviours. The urgency of now demands it. We need to begin rejecting violence, aggression and vulgarity in all its forms, especially in our music and our politics. We must change how we raise our children, particlarly our boys who must be groomed to become responsible husbands and fathers. We must also look at how we treat each other. We may never be able to love each other unconditionally, but we should at least learn how to respect each other. Importantly, we must also learn how to respectfully disagree, recognising that a diversity of opinions, ideas and behaviours strengthens our society.
Most importantly, civil society needs to redouble its efforts to help the poor and disenfranchised. When the poorest among us can also enjoy lives of relative decency, then the wealthiest among us will no longer need to seek refuge in gated communities.
Handel Emery
handelemery@hotmail.com
Truly, the barbarity must end!
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