Lance Neita | Creating spaces for children to play

Jamaica is in the grip of a generation that has lost the joys of childhood.

The Gleaner published a story a few years ago about the heavy burden of violence that children are carrying in their tender years.

On-site interviews in a crime-ridden area painted a grim picture of an everyday experience where children are taught to ‘get flat’ when the gunshots ring out in the naked city. On the streets or at home, the reaction is instantaneous. Some children, according to the article, reported that they knew of multiple deaths of family members or intimate acquaintances.

“Run inside if you are outside. Drop on the ground if you are inside. When you hear talking or the police siren, it’s kind of safe to come outside.” Oh my Lord!

“I ask God to protect me from all the perils and danger,” said a 14-year-old high-school girl. “I get flat and then I pray while I am flat.” What an indictment of our society and what a revelation this story has been.

If all of this is happening on the front line, then what will become of the next generation? The teachers have not given up, but frankly, many of them are not sure how they can handle the situation.

Students are growing up under the trauma of vicious crimes and the lack of respect for life that they see and experience night and day and where the conversation each morning revolves around the latest crime in the neighbourhood and the tally of those killed the night before.

Online communication has become a distraction from education and instead, has opened the door to all types of debased lifestyles and morals that influence and twist young minds.

Where, as we stand on the edge of this dark pit, do we put the students in safe keeping while we seek the answers and the means to keep them from falling over the precipice?

STORYLINES

The storylines play a big part in this damage to values and norms. Good no longer triumphs over bad. The bad men are idolised as the heroes. In sitcoms, deceptions and lies are the highlights of the funnier moments. Simple cartoons are abusive. Old-time comic books were not. Children laugh every Saturday morning at caricatures on television depicting death, tragedies, accidents, fights, beatings, blood.

And pity the poor police. They end up getting the short stick in most stage plays, starting from the community youth club presentation levels.

So with law and order being ridiculed at this infancy stage, you can understand how ‘police and tief’ becomes a deadly game in adult life.

And where do these murderers come from? They come directly out of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where the subject of the play, with a dagger in his hand, makes his ghostly walk towards the royal bed chamber to take the king’s life.

“Now o’er the one half-world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates their chieftain Hecate’s offerings; and wither’d murder, alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, and with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design moves like a ghost.”

Shakespeare certainly says it best. These guys who shoot and kill at random seem to be in another world curtained off from common sense and humane thinking, caring nothing about the lives snuffed out, whether it be children, mothers, fathers, widows, the poor, the innocents. They have racked up a bill against society that is unpayable.

Macbeth’s soliloquy teases us out of our slumber sometimes after watching the news as we envision those thieves of the night getting set to go on their murderous prowl. You have to lament how Jamaicans who grew up with the lights and sounds of peenie wallies and croaking frogs outside an open window must now spend half their nights scared of those new sounds that make more than a bump in the night.

Hand in hand with our crime rate, there is a creeping paralysis across the society that is stifling all norms and values, has no respect for law and order, is inspired by form over substance, mediocrity disguised as intelligence, and no appreciation or understanding of the risk of indulging in depraved choices that can elevate self-indulgent popularism into leadership roles.

Crime stories earn highest ratings on the news reports, prompting the caution that the 7 o’clock news is now for adults only.

DARK PLACE

We are indeed at a dark place at this time. Our country needs a united front against crime and social collapse. National leadership needs to be exemplary, resolute, and firm.

The police and military have a daunting task ahead of them. Their bravery, and their success, is our success. We have to keep them in our prayers as they take the fight to the gangsters.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has expressed concerns that criminal gangs could threaten the sovereignty of Jamaica if they are not rigorously pursued and nullified with the use of extra security powers.

My little Thursday evening discussion group came up with an unanswerable question: Should these guys be charged with treason? After all, they have adopted the role of enemies of the State, doing their best to damage Jamaica’s image abroad and doing irreparable harm to our beloved country.

As amateur lawyers, we came up with no satisfactory answers save to note that one of many legal definitions of treason states that it may include doing damage to the operation of the Government and its agencies, particularly where involved in security. At the end of the round(s), we decided to throw the matter out of court.

But the question remains hanging. What can we do to stop this crime wave? How can we recreate spaces for our children to play and make Jamaica “the place of choice to live, work, raise families, and do business” – Vision 2030 Jamaica?

Everyone seems to have the answer, but so far, no one has found the solution. In the meantime ‘withered murder’ continues its stealthy pace towards its nightly design.

Only God has the answer to these stalkers. It is to Him we must turn as a nation, on bended knee, and from the bottom of our hearts, to cry out to Him, to stop them before it’s too late.

Lance Neita is a public relations professional, author, and historian. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lanceneita@hotmail.com.