by Colin Hyde

This world can be hard sometimes. One can be at the wrong place at the wrong time. One can be taken down by a bullet meant for someone else. For 44-year-old Ronny Sierra it’s just the rottenest luck to fall off a roof and land on a stick that looked like something used for husking coconuts.

A roofer is among the nimblest of people, but even the most agile can get hurt when they fall. Many things can go wrong. The roofer could have been carrying something heavy, or one of his legs could have snagged on something, causing him to be totally off balance when he fell. Naturally, the higher you fall from, the more dangerous it is. The story is that Ronny was working on the roof of a bungalow.

What does a man say when he wakes up in the other world after an incident like that? You fall, you brace yourself and prepare to spring up back when you hit the ground, and you land on a stake.

The superstitious will say it was meant to be. Some people who really have to check themselves will look for something in the brother’s life to blame for what happened. It’s a fair question why the ground around the house hadn’t been cleared of all objects that had the potential to cause harm.

A number of drivers are on our highways driving like they’re looking for an accident, and they survive the inevitable smashup. There are so many risky things we do, and when things go wrong we escape injury. This one, with Ronny Sierra, man, this is just the rottenest luck. I pray all the best for his family, to help them get over their tremendous loss.

Jail for faysi man for touching a girl’s derriere

The story made it as far as the Loop (Caribbean), how a former police officer got two years for “squeezing the buttocks of a 17-year-old girl in September 2023.” The Loop said the former officer, 27-year-old Melvin Canul, appeared in court unrepresented. The girl was returning a flag “she had borrowed from a cadet instructor”, and “while folding the flag, a Hispanic officer whom she did not know, passed by and squeezed her on the left side of her buttocks.” I have no questions for the magistrate. I understand it is the law in Belize.

You know I am greatly aggrieved about the penalty. I shared my dismay with someone in the village close to me, and she told me that some decades ago a brother from the village who was called “Baas”, went to jail for the same crime. The brother was drunk, and he slapped a woman’s behind and said, “Weh di goh aahn, Bati?” When he went to court the magistrate said: “So, you da Mista Grab Bati. A will teach you to intafayr wid that part of the female anatomy. Hoal ya, grab sohn yaaz da bak.” Well, I believe that’s what the magistrate said, or thought when he passed sentence.

You don’t have to buy this, but I know I would have been a daam fine boxer if I had laced on gloves. I would have clocked a lot of guys. But I don’t know if I would have had (have) a good chin. I lean to the belief that my chin would have been as fragile as the one Thomas Hearns has on his face. Remember he absolutely beat up Sugar Ray Leonard, until he got tapped on the jaw.

I believe I’d be a natural on the bench too. But I know I would have had great difficulty passing sentence in certain types of cases. I wouldn’t want to be the judge presiding over the Selgado case or the case with the brother who absolutely bullied the little boy.

Allow me to revisit a story with a little more depth. Late one evening, I was travelling on a west bound bus, sitting beside a tall European dude. He was sitting near the window, leaning against it as if he was napping. At some point during the trip his opened hand fell on my thigh. I took hold of his wrist and put his hand in his lap. He apologized. Some miles down the road, his opened hand fell on my thigh again. I grasped his wrist, a little more firmly this time, and put his hand where it belonged. He apologized again.

I’m not in the habit of looking strangers in the face. I don’t know if all gay men have a look, but some of them do. When I moved the guy’s hand the second time I glanced at him. He looked gay to me. It had entered my mind that he might be for UNIBAM the first time his hand fell on me. The reason I had that suspicion is because I was sitting at the far end of the seat. Hmm, if it was a nice young lady sitting beside me I wouldn’t have been punishing myself, being so ehm scornful.

I’ll leave that there to go here. I wasn’t happy about that guy’s hand falling on my thigh. But I didn’t hate him for it. If he really was gay, I was just the wrong try.

It’s US culture for guys in sports to pat their teammates’ behinds. That’s not the culture here. It’s not US culture for guys to slap women on the butt. That’s not the culture here either. It’s chaansi for a guy to grab a woman or a girl’s behind. And for sure they should pay for that.

I understand the law. It is to protect women. Physically, they are the weaker sex and some of us on the other side have been using our physical advantage, like for 6,000 years, to have our way with them. This law is also to protect men. It is natural and cultural for the men in a family to protect their women. If the state doesn’t provide redress for what was done to the woman or girl, it falls to the men and boys in her family to deal with matters. So, it is a good thing on both counts for the law to be aggressively applied.

The punishment must fit the crime. I have to say it again. If no one else thinks this punishment is criminal, I do. It is the doing of the intellectual group. While it took most of us 6,000 years to realize that in the world of human sexuality there is L and G and B and T and so on, we’ve always known that human beings fall in three categories – intellectual, physical, and the hybrids. Wholesale it is the intellectuals who set such a crazy punishment.

Have you ever wondered how an inane adage like “sticks and stones may break my bones but words may never hurt me” survived for so many years? How absurd can you get? The book called Proverbs teaches that the tongue can be absolutely viperous. The reason why that adage hasn’t been rightly debunked is because words are the tools of lawyers. Intellectuals can absolutely papisho a physical man, and if the physical man lifts a finger against them it’s jail and the maximum penalty for the poor man who can’t defend himself with words.

We can’t talk lashing because the intellectuals say that punishment is barbaric. Some of them say lashing reminds of slavery days. Nothing is more “slavery” than the way our people unquestioningly swallow thoughts put in their heads by Europeans. The Europeans, who since 1492 have wrought havoc on the world, banned corporal punishment decades ago on the grounds that it is inhumane.

We shouldn’t be talking incarceration for what that man did. Incarceration at a public facility is for people who commit murder, and rape. The villain should be exposed. The villain should do 2 years of community service. The villain should be placed under humane incarceration – house arrest. The villain deserves a proper lashing. The villain should get his batam lashed, hard, until ih baal.

But, if it’s habitual, a persistent bati grabba, a man crazy enough to go back and do it again, then there’s no choice but to lose the key, either at the place for people with mental issues or the one for people who are seriously violent.