Even now, there are old timers who yearn for those days when children could be taught that manners had the power to take them through life; these same old timers fondly remember the time when the report of a murder was exceptional bad news for the community at large.
We too remember that there was a time in The Bahamas when the community itself could be revolted and when families could be shamed by the errant antics of one of its members. Alas! Those days are gone; and for the most part, those days have been forgotten.
There are tens of thousands of Bahamians who know no other world than the one that has been depicted by our current prime minister of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas, the Rt. Hon. Perry Christie. As we recall he made a pointed reference to the impact of violent crime on Bahamian society.
He was of the view that the level of violent crime in our society is simply unacceptable. The level of viciousness in the commission of murders and rapes and robberies in our society is simply intolerable. There is no other way to put it.
As he rhetorically asked: Tell me what gives these thugs the right to smash somebody’s front door down and then march up the stairs and rape a man’s wife right in front of him with a gun pressed against his head?
His conclusion to the matter was put this way: Well, I’ll tell you one thing tonight. Perry Christie and this new PLP Government now solemnly declare an unrelenting war on crime. Enough is enough! The time has come to take our country back so people don’t have to stay cooped up in their homes, afraid to even go to sleep.
This and more like this was what The Hon. Perry Christie had to say about violent crime and its impact on Bahamian society. That in a sense was then. When the prime minister said what he would do about crime, the public expected a response that would make a real difference.
In a sense, all that the prime minister had to say about crime was about then.
Today our concern is with now.
The sad news coming in today speaks about the extent to which the rot has set in among some of this nation’s youth. One terrible report speaks about how one angry young man killed another. Another story is all about a nasty riot in one of this nation’s premier high schools. This time around the violence took the form of a full-scale battering by some one armed with a baseball bat. We have been reliably informed some of the smaller and younger students were trampled underfoot a surging tide of angry young men.
In the aftermath, the school swung into action and expelled both victims and victimizers.
As they say, the beat goes on.
These ugly incidents and others that we have recited and named in this space underscore the conclusion that something is dreadfully wrong in this society. It is now quite evident, things did not just get this way overnight.
It would be safe and quite in order to assume that today’s disasters are the inevitable consequence of yesterday’s neglect; yesterday’s ill-conceived projects; and yesterday’s shortsightedness.
Today’s thugs were yesterday’s babes in arms that were neglected and abused. Today’s barbarian was – in all likelihood – the consequence of some woman’s mistake or some girl-child who was force-ripened into motherhood is today’s baffled mother weeping for the child of her youth.
We hasten to add that abuse and neglect are not the sole purview of the poor and the distressed. Crime is today an equal opportunity destroyer, wreaking havoc on the middle classes; thereby awakening them to the fact that crime’s storm surge is no respecter of persons.
All of this is part of a larger effort aimed at raising the alarm at the extent to which violence has so seeped into the fabric of social life in The Bahamas that it has come to be treated as an essential part of the national decor.
This is all so very, very sad.
It need not be so. Tragically it is so precisely because Bahamians have not had leadership that was up to the challenge. This, too, can and should change sooner rather than later.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
