Last Wednesday on looking at the front page of a daily newspaper, I could only shake my head in despair at the graphic scenes of impending violence, with knives drawn in the closest of encounters with death in the offing, and wonder aloud about how we as a people could come to this! Normally there would have been the normal "cuss out" followed by the frantic marking of the road to indicate the position of the vehicles on impact, and then the usual rush to the police station.
How things have changed, and should you think of this as an isolated incident I refer you to the recent incident on the Diego Highway where this supposed "road rage" resulted in a similar confrontation involving not mere knives, but a gun with one of the two combatants being shot through the head!
Even with two similar incidents there are still those who would scream "coincidence," but casually viewing a TV station the same evening I saw a clip involving a security guard and three students at a south school, and again in the past there would have been the usual aggressive retort by the offended students, but never the kind of raw violence by students as depicted on the screen.
I have lumped this school incident in with the two involving road rage because both demonstrate a tendency towards raw violence, even leading to death, arising from incidents which would have normally had their natural boundaries as to how far one should go which our social institutions such as the home, the school, the church, inter alia, would have cultivated in us.
Now, that moral constraint which would have been natural to us seems to have disappeared and in its place is worrying indifference to that traditional sense of the limits to our behaviours which these incidents amply reflect, and the new mindset in the would-be criminal, is an impulsive, spontaneous, unadulterated violence with absolutely no sense of how morally reprehensible such behaviour is.
The depravity all reflect this almost total absence of any moral and ethical restraint in the things we do, and I mean all of us, for this disease goes beyond the physical violence of the would-be criminal as we are equally culpable in the way we often lie and cheat and dissemble without conscience.
Again I ask, how as a people have we come to this? In a nutshell in the limited space of this format, I think, first and foremost, that we are reaping the whirlwind of a legal system which by its ineptitude has created a culture of criminality without consequence, of the kind seen in the examples above and others like them, and secondly and in a related way, because of leaders, some of whom are not only perceived as symptoms of this rampant criminality but also have neither the will, vision nor character to stem this all-consuming tide and provide us with the moral and ethical yardstick by which to model our own lives.
There must be change in these two critical areas of our existence as a society if our humanity as a people is to be restored.
Dr Errol Benjamin,
via e-mail