Blogging about Murder

T&T newspapers, blogs and airwaves went explosive this week with outrage over the suspected murder (only partially assuaged now by reports of a “drowning”) of eight-year-old Daniel Guerra in Gasparillo last Friday. His tiny, partially decomposed body was found floating in a river off the Tarouba Link Road, San Fernando. It’s the final straw isn’t it? We want BLOOD now, don’t we? We would love to spit on them, stone them perhaps, before they are hung, preferably in an open space, perhaps in the Brian Lara promenade?  And we would like to do it over again. We want to train people to become hangmen, a hangman’s factory. We want a cemetery for murderers.

Okay then, if hanging is the solution, hang them. Never forget though, they are part of us, we created them, with our music, our “gimme gimme, massa day done” culture of which we are very much a part.

Remember, even as we were rapidly on our way to becoming the most murderous nation in the world (nearly there, nearly there, we are moving fast)...even after Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj had nine men hung, nothing changed. But what if I told you what you already know; that the murderers’ factory is multiplying at a rate that the hangman’s factory could not deal with. They are crawling out in the thousands every year from primary schools. They are sitting in cars watching you in malls, cinemas, and outside banks. They are throwing bricks at cars and threatening teachers in classrooms. They are wiping your windshields threateningly. They are posing as workmen and construction workers when they should be at school. They are dressing like women. They are everywhere...Go ahead, catch them if you can. They don’t expect to live past their 20s anyway.

It’s likely they rise out of the ranks of the 500,000 functionally illiterate, or the pool of 300,000 who live below the poverty line, absorbed by the cavern of gangs where even the brave don’t venture without police protection; sitting in a forest somewhere, idly polishing a gun, waiting for a “wuk” to “take out” somebody or waiting for the drug boat to come in. They are products of our own “macho culture,” the hundreds of thousands of children whose fathers have abandoned them, and mothers who are too busy turning a dollar to “see about them.”

Solution starts with Ministry of Education

You have been emailing me, saying to me: “We have read about the young living dead, the children who are victims of neglect from parents (products themselves of the state supported “culture” of banal noise masquerading as music and make-work programmes) who don’t care if they kill or are killed.”  What’s the solution? I’ve been mulling it over. Practically, I think, the solutions must start in the Ministry of Education.  A data base of students must be released to the Ministry of Social Development which should be a disaster centre-type coordinating agency made up of Government, NGOs and the private sector which can donate school books, money for remedial classes, extra lessons, school supplies all year round, taking responsibility for a child, a classroom or school.

Doctors and psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists must be brought in the loop. No child should go unchecked or without help. Those living with single working parents should be assigned a guardian or mentor who regularly checks up on them and reports their needs to the central Ministry of Social Development. This is just one idea. There are hundreds of ways of doing this. If there ever is a state of emergency, it should be done in the name of our unlovely, unloved, unseeing, invisible children, leaden with hopelessness. I never thought that the yoga teacher of all people would have the solution.  We can only find it if we decide to heal, he said to a class of women bristling with the death of the eight-year-old boy who could have been any of ours. And the way we can each get rid of our need for retribution, he said, is to understand how desperately the unlovely children of this country need us to hold out our arms to them so they can love us back and not shoot us point blank with the steely, unseeing eyes of the unloved.

BLOGS
If I were a politician I would keep a close eye on the mushrooming influence of blogs, which in this day of racing technology, are an accurate gauge of “how the people thinking.”
I have left them in their original unedited form.

Blogger 1 (victim)

Daughter of murdered father. (Shot 9 times, beaten badly) Robbed at his business place & home many times during his lifetime. Daughter of mother who was shot 3 times, robbed twice in her lifetime. Sister of 3 brothers all robbed many times during their lives, one shot & beaten.  Sister in law of three. All robbed, and at gunpoint @ some point in their lives.  Aunt of attempted kidnap victim, niece, aged 5.
Neighbour of many victims. One whose daughter was murdered, schoolgirl @ BAHS, 17.  Neighbour opposite, shot @ by police. (A mistake...take dat) Even though from a gated community, (Blue Range) many of my neighbours on my street have been robbed over the years.  Three separate incidents involved guns.  I could go on, but why?”

Blogger 2 (citizens’ voice)

“So happy to see that the poll taken is greatly in support of hanging. Let’s get the Bill passed and get on with what the majority of people want.”

Blogger 3

“Capital Punishment is indeed “the law of the land” but it is a cruel and barbaric legacy of slavery and indentureship, imposed throughout the then British Empire.  It has been abolished throughout the civilised world, with a few exceptions, and described as an act of the utmost cruelty and barbarity.”

Blogger 4

“Shut your blasted mouth with this rubbish.  Stop the crime then by pampering to these murderous barbarians.  Decapitate their ases (sic) and put them through a local firing squad.  Barbarians don’t understand decency.”

Blogger 5

“To all the people moaning an groaning about “vigilante’s”, STOP BEING HYPOCRITES!!! If you and your children are attacked by bandits, would you really just stand by and allow your kids to be raped and murdered? Would you meekly wait till the criminals have finished their business, politely bid them good day and then call the police? The fact is you would do what every rational being would, fight as hard as you could, and if you had the power, kill the bastards”