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Editorials
Things are falling apart
Sunday, October 25, 2009
It is not the practice of this space to preach gloom and doom, but when we review the items that made the news last week, it's hard not to do otherwise.
For even though the various grinning images of Jamaicans enjoying themselves would seem to indicate that things, though tough, are not really all that bad, the fact is that the monster that is crime is getting more and more brazen. And there are valid reasons to believe that its evil perpetrators - whom we still believe to be in the minority - are gaining ground.
Yesterday's report on the invasion of Farm Primary and Junior High School in Green Pond, St James by armed gunmen who killed one vendor and injured two others is illustrative of the very grave danger that we are in.
According to the story, the three heavily armed gunmen who invaded the school in broad daylight - minutes after the morning recess - were young men. What, we ask, would possess three young men to do this?
Who are they?
Where did their guns come from?
How many more of them are lurking around like time bombs waiting to explode?
Our failure over several decades to face up to the answers to these questions and deal with the issues raised by them is, in large part, responsible for the hell we are reaping now.
For the truth is that the young men who invaded Farm Primary and Junior High School are products of an inferior education, courtesy of the State, their parents and indeed the entire society.
Their thriving existence is possible because of the very same link between politics and crime that Police Commissioner Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin spoke about so cautiously two weeks ago.
This is the link that is in part responsible for the easy passage of innumerable guns and ammunition through a Customs Department that, for all its technological advances, is still being undermined by corruption.
This is the link that must bear significant responsibility for the blooming scandal that is our Government's treatment of the United States' extradition request for Mr Christopher 'Dudus' Coke to answer to charges of narcotic and arms trafficking. Surely this must be the greatest symbol of validation that young men, like the ones who shot up the Farm Primary and Junior High School, have embraced as an alternative to the proverbial straight and narrow.
We shudder to think how much their refusal to at least pretend to be interested in doing the right thing on this one will cost us as a country.
In the meantime, what do the rest of us do?
Do we struggle to maintain the remaining seams of social order, knowing that our efforts will ultimately be wasted within the context of our corrupt environment?
Or do we just give up and go with the various alternatives - the 'Duduses' and the M Central Watches that have blossomed within the vacuum of the State's ineptitude?
Either way, it seems, our goose is cooked.
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