Dark times have been upon the land
“Members of Parliament, Jamaica, these are dark times for our country, and we need as a country, all of us, from all walks of life, must stop and reflect and pray for all of us, all of us as citizens of this country. The murders have got to stop. It is senseless. It is gruesome. It is evil. It is barbaric. Outside is dark. The clouds are dark. They are hanging over us, and all around us.”
For me, Speaker of the House of Representatives Marisa Dalrymple Philibert, in commenting on the massacre of five members of a family in Cocoa Piece, Clarendon, in the early hours of last Tuesday, struck a most critical chord. These are indeed dark times.
What could have possessed someone to slit the throats of 31-year-old Kemisha Wright and her four children — 15-year-old Kimana Smith, 10-year-old Shemari Smith, five-year-old Kafana Smith, and 23-month-old baby boy Kishaun Henry?
“Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy,” said Captain Gustave Gilbert, the army psychologist assigned to watch the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. Gilbert’s definition of evil might explain the savagery.
“A genuine incapacity to feel for their fellow men,” according to Gilbert was the “one characteristic that connects all the defendants.”
The long-standing and numerous acts of barbarity in our country, I believe, have their roots in this incapacity to feel for our fellow countrymen.
The “milk of human kindness” (Macbeth 1:5), to borrow the words of William Shakespeare, has all but completely dried up in the breasts of far too many of us.
Who remembers the Kendal train crash in Manchester on September 1, 1957? It is the worst railway disaster in our history. Colleague columnist Lance Neita, in an article titled ‘The church picnic that never made it back home’, published in the Jamaica Observer on September 12, 2015, noted that the aftermath saw panicked Jamaicans rummaging to find relatives who had been on the train.
“The Mandeville and Spaulding hospitals, and all nearby clinics as far as May Pen, were crammed with victims transported by ambulance, car, truck, or handcarts. Alcan bauxite personnel from nearby Kirkvine, the Red Cross, the Jamaica Defence Force, the Jamaica Constabulary Force, doctors, nurses, fire brigades, and thousands of Jamaicans from every nook and cranny raced to the scene,” he said.
According to Neita, as people searched for relatives, pickpockets moved through the crowd, robbing the dead “in a brazen and merciless fashion”. “It was said that one of them chopped off a victim’s arm to remove a wristwatch while the person was still gasping for life.”
This descent into the lowest depths of depravity happened in a context in which, “Fragments of human bodies were strewn among scores of twisted metal. Close to 200 persons lost their lives, and 700 sustained injuries in what was described as the worst rail disaster in Jamaica’s history, and the second worst rail disaster in the world at that time.” (The Gleaner, September 3, 2001)
I remember reading many years ago a sad story in one of our dailies about a truck transporting flour which had overturned in Moneague, St Ann. A large crowd gathered at the scene of the accident. I remember the news item said that the driver had been pinned in the cab. Eyewitnesses recited the painful manner in which the injured truck driver screamed for help.
A good Samaritan, who worked in Ocho Rios, stopped. He recounted how difficult it was to get help to pull the driver from the cabin.
Why? Scores of people were busy securing bags of flour for themselves.
This is neither recent nor is it an oddity in Jamaica. I did some cursory research on the matter of the robbing of goods trucks that had been involved in accidents. I came upon some interesting news items in The Gleaner archives from as far back as the 1950s, in which people handsomely helped themselves to the contents of overturned trucks — chicken, cement, liquor, and related items — prior to assisting the injured.
I disagree with those who treat these incidents as occasions for amusement. On the contrary, I see them as indications of a society whose empathy needle is critically nearing ‘E’.
Metastasising sickness
Who remembers the horrific fire at Fesco gas station in February 2020? A story in the local Star newspaper of February 24, 2020, titled ‘Nobody helped him — Widow of man killed in gas station fire bemoans lack of compassion from passers-by’, gave us a tragic summary of the fire at Heaven’s Fesco gas station in Mandeville, Manchester.
It noted, inter alia: “The wife of Daniel Farquharson, the man who died as a result of injuries he sustained in a gas station fire in Mandeville, is pleading for videos and pictures of her husband circulating on social media to be taken down.
“The pig farmer and mechanic died Saturday afternoon at University Hospital of the West Indies after being transferred from Mandeville Regional Hospital.
“He didn’t get any help. Nobody was helping him, he was just there and they were just taking pictures, pictures! I heard that they were saying he was a madman that is why they didn’t help him,” the wife said.
Sadness.
It nuh set suh!
Readers by now know that I am an ardent fan of the author Charles Dickens. Some of my articles have made extensive reference to many of his books. Here is another which I believe is apt.
There is a wonderful moment in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol where Ebenezer Scrooge asked the third ghost: “Are you a vision of things that must be or things that may be?”
The ghost does not answer. However, it is clear to the discerning reader it is the vision of things that may be.
Dickens, consistent with a major theme in many of his works, was reiterating the message that the present does not have to be the future.
This is a lesson that we all would do well to chew on. Our perilous descent can be halted.
I don’t believe “a suh di ting set”. We can shift from the present noxious social trajectory.
Other countries have done it. We can also. But, we need a greater application of political will and matching actions. And time is not on our side.
House Speaker Dalrymple Philibert is right, these are indeed dark times. The clouds have been hovering over this country for many, many years. And I hate to say this, but some — me included — have been warning for a very long time that this day would come.
In 2013, for example, I wrote among other things in my The Agenda column: “I believe that while blind self-interest has always been a theme in our daily relations, it has now degenerated into a suffocating monstrosity. If we do not stop the march of this destructive and horrible beast there will not be much to leave to our children. For life would have become totally “nasty, brutish and short” (Thomas Hobbes).
It is time to massively change course. I believe that one of our biggest challenges is that we do not have a national/common civic spirit. I don’t see where there is a national set of principles which we all defend and/or agree with as non-negotiable.
In this kind of fluid social context, relativism and polarisation of various forms find a fertile womb to grow and mature.
Eloquence of action
Last Tuesday members on both sides of the House of Representatives spoke out strongly and in unison against the brutal murders in Cocoa Piece, Clarendon.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness said, among other things: “Horrific murders such as these are shocking to our very core and we must finally resolve as a country to set aside differences and take every action necessary in an all-of-society effort to save lives and eradicate violence at its root.”
Opposition Leader Mark Golding said the killings had a “degree of savagery that indicates a certain mentality which is disturbing and depraved”.
“It is an event that must cause us to pause and think again. There is a pall of violence at large in our country that affects all of us and we have to examine how we go forward to deal with this kind of savagery,” said Dr Horace Chang, the minister of national security.
And the Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams noted: “It is my heartfelt hope that we will never have to go through another one of these again…
“There’s nothing else I could do this morning when I got the news than to make my way to the community to be there to offer whatever support I could,” Williams said. (Jamaica Observer, June 21, 2022)
Some are going to straightaway “kiss their teeth”, as we say in local parlance, and bellow, “Dem just a chat!”
And I am sure the Doubting Thomases are going to shout, “Yes, I have seen this movie before.”
I understand their cynicism, but I believe the collective condemnation of the parliamentarians was absolutely necessary, but certainly not sufficient. A national recognition by our elected leaders that dark times are upon the land is an important step forward.
We need now to move on from the eloquence of words to eloquence of action.
Folks are looking to see what happens next. Out of this great tragedy, national good must emerge.
As unconventional as this sounds, I believe the dark clouds over the country are another opportunity to make a paradigm shift. We need to abandon characteristic sameness.
What kind of Jamaica?
I believe we now need to decisively decide the kind of Jamaica we want. The choice, to me, is clear.
Jamaica is one of the most violent countries in the world. How do we reconcile liberty with security?
Some among us say, “Not an inch of my liberty must be limited.” But, is this possible, given our realities?
What is the end game of those who foolishly believe that they can preserve their liberty by pretending the realities of today’s Jamaica do not exist?
Incidentally, I have not heard a single word of condemnation of the murders of Cocoa Piece from any civil society groups. Why? But, “on rapid”, as we say in local parlance, they are quick to churn out formulaic denunciation when vicious criminals who prey on innocent citizens are killed.
I don’t for a second approve of the unlawful killing of any citizen, but I cannot help but wonder why some among us who preach that they defend the liberty of all citizens are outraged only when criminals are killed by agents of the State. Something does not pass the new car smell test here. Something stinks!
I have said it before, but it bears repeating: We encourage low levels of personal responsibility in nearly every facet of daily life in this country. Why? Acceptance of personal responsibility does not fetch a premium, nor is it a big vote-getter in our country. I suspect that is a large part of the explanation as to why so many of our citizens believe someone else is responsible for their every action, or inaction, and must, therefore, bear the consequences of either. Do we continue along this fault line? I say, no!
On April 21, 1961 Edward Seaga, then Opposition member of the pre-independence Legislative Council, delivered a speech which famously elaborated the yawning social and economic gaps between the vast majority who owned nothing/had very little and the minority that owned/had a lot.
Seaga’s “haves and the have-nots” is still relevant today. In the 1960s, Lee Kuan Yew the first Prime Minister of Singapore and his team developed an economic and social model suited to the people of that country in order to dissolve the economic and social/racial divisions which negated her rise. We are yet to develop a unique model to solve our challenges.
The fix
When things hit rock bottom, that is an opportunity. I believe a major part of the solution to our numerous social and economic problems is the creation of a fit-for-purpose and modern education system. The implementation of the recommendations of the report of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission, chaired by Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University, is a road map which, I believe, can significantly help to rescue this country from her long-standing doldrums.
Many years ago former Prime Minister Edward Seaga told us that “knowledge is the way”. He also said, “There is no educated country that is poor, and there is no poor country that is educated.” We would be foolish to ignore this sage comment.
Garfield Higgins is an educator, journalist and a senior advisor to the minister of education & youth. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.