Wed. Sept. 5, 2007
The Editor AMANDALA
Sir,
I received the news this morning that the young man who was shot and killed last night in Belize City, was the same young man who had jumped into the back of my pickup the night of the Junie Balls murder last week Monday, and in a very emotional state demanded that I take him to the hospital to see his uncle whose body was reportedly at the hospital.
Returning from the crime scene, I had stopped the pickup at the house where the young man resides, as a colleague accompanying me wanted to pass on the sad and shocking news to his friends there that Junie Balls had just been killed.
The young man, a stranger, quickly apologized to me for sounding so aggressive, but I empathized with him, and he respectfully thanked me for understanding and agreeing to drop him by the KHMH.
The pain of losing his uncle was visibly heartrending and destabilizing for this young man. Seeing him holding up his baggy pants, and threatening the world with revenge for his uncle, my mind just sobbed with grief at the destruction of our young people, caught in a struggle that they themselves don’t even understand, but are only reacting with their sense of manhood in this world that has no comfortable place for them. Floyd Gladden looked to me like he was still a teenager; an angry, confused and frustrated young man who was ready to kill or die in his grief. (Midday news today said Floyd was 22 years old.)
Today Floyd Gladden also is dead, from gunshots. But the Minister of Police, in his address to the nation in the House of Representatives on Friday last, is concerned about the many “crimes of passion”. Are we getting into comedy now? Is the Minister suggesting that what we need is more marital counseling? The joke is on us, Belizeans; but it isn’t funny. We need to get serious about the reconstruction of our society which has been devastated by the failure of our economic planning, our educational and justice system, and the neglect of our young people, leaving them to become players in and victims of the “parallel market”.
Though television has seemingly taken their attention away from many of us, we can’t resign ourselves to condemning our youth. We must seek out and address their situation with all the vision, understanding, firmness, love and empathy we can summon. For their failure is a reflection of our failure.
Our individual efforts are helpful, but may not be effective if we all don’t act together, and that is where leadership comes in. A national effort has to be initiated, but any one or group who has or develops that capability is, by definition within our system, becoming political or potentially political, and a threat to the established political parties. (Consider the unsolved Derek Aikman kidnapping.) Such is the paradox of our situation, as each day “another brother fallen”. Either one of the established political parties miraculously rises to the occasion, or a new political party must surface and lead the charge in this new direction. But, for obvious political reasons, this is a task fraught with dangerous possibilities.
R.I.P. my young brothers,
Charles X