Melville Cooke
LIKE EVERY OTHER PERSON of sound mind in this country, I have been very distraught not only about the recent rash of child murders but the sheer brutality and apparently random nature of the killings. It has caused me to reposition the word 'horrific'; I thought that the 100 Lane slaughter of four years ago was horrific, but when a six-year-old child can be strangled and dumped, as was done to Jihad George McCool, 'horrific' does not quite mean what it once did.
For those of us who have children of around the same age as those who are murdered the effect of the acts of savagery is intensified, as we literally see the victims before us, laughing, playing, crying, sleeping.
And when a child is stabbed and killed simply walking in his own community you wonder just what you are growing your own child up in this country to face.
RETREAT INTO RELIGION
When something of this nature and magnitude hits, many tend to retreat into religion for comfort and blind acceptance that it is the will of the Lord (whichever version of God they choose to accept). I, too, though I am vehemently non-Christian, find myself turning to the country's predominant version of God, not for comfort, but for an explanation, through what is supposed to be his word, the Bible.
I theorise that as an overwhelmingly Christian country, in upbringing if not in how we live, the overriding socialising agent is Christianity and its holy text, the Bible. And while the vast majority of us abhor the very thought of harming a child, I believe that there is justification in the Bible for exacting revenge on children, a justification that the child killers may not specifically think of but forms the basic attitude from which their heinous acts spring.
Call it the fundamentalism of fools who take the notion of the sins of the father being visited on the third and fourth generations, as stated in Exodus 20:5, Deuteronomy 5:9 and Exodus 34: 6-7, very bloodily literally.
Even the last two verses of Psalm 137 which is incorporated into one of our most popular songs ever, 'Rivers of Babylon', is extremely bloody in rejoicing about the potential murder of children.
And think about ourselves; how many times have we said "if it no ketch yu it gwine ketch yu pickney", or explained away someone's misfortune by saying that their parents did something wrong?
I contend that even the actions which repulse us are often a part of our national psyche, whether we like it or not.
MAJOR FACTOR
I remember a police officer explaining earlier this year that revenge is a major factor in the killing of children, and I always remember the story of a 16-year-old-boy who, earlier this year, stopped along Old Harbour Road in St. Catherine on his way somewhere else. A man walked up beside him, said "Gi yu faada dis" and shot him in the head. Realising that he had shot the wrong person, he walked a little further up the road and shot his intended target, killing him. The first boy was left blind. "Happy is the man who pays you back for what you have done to us/who takes your babies and smashes them against a rock."
There is also the matter of how we incorrectly define 'courage', confusing it with cruelty. It is not surprising, in a country which consistently turns out illiterates from its education system and the level of English passes are notoriously bad, that we should confuse being 'cold', as in having no feeling, with being bold, as in brave.
Hence, we have persons in our society who seem to be competing against themselves in being 'cold' and, after killing two and three and four adults at a time, to get colder you have to choose more helpless targets, like old people and children. And to get really cold, you have to kill them in terrible ways. And to be the coldest, you have to kill them in terrible ways, in bulk.
Like buying three of an item at wholesale price.
Nelville Cooke is a freelance writer.
