Wesley Gibbings
This week I want to reintroduce you to three young men you probably already know something about. Three different people, from three different contexts. Young men. One is 22. The other was 26 when he was killed, and the last one is of indeterminate age but somewhere between 18 and 25.
Their stories are not linked in any way, but require us to take a special look at our young men, and to add the context of male youth to the situations they face.
Meet Nishal Sankat. On Friday, Nishal appeared in the Brevard County Court in Florida, handcuffed and accused of attempting to steal an aircraft– the most serious of three charges. On Monday, Botham Shem Jean (pronounced ‘szah’ in Saint Lucia) was laid to rest in his native land after being murdered in Texas. The last youngster is still among us and you probably saw him today.
Nishal, living alone and studying abroad, apparently confessed to having a plan to “harm himself”.
I am not sure whether people understand what it is like for parents, who care at least, to admit to the possible validity of such a claim by a child of theirs. But in this case, they apparently did.
“Very depressed” was actually the term used by his father–“depressed”, of course being a shorthand way of describing a rather complex and serious medical condition. Young Nishal looked scared and disoriented in court. Oversized glasses, force-ripe beard on a gaunt face, some kind of dark, padded, armless prison wear. The look of fear mistaken by the cynical as a sneer.
I know of some who have returned home. Farewell parties, going away gifts and all. One month. Two months. Big man. Back home.
The outpouring of ignorance over this has been appalling. Could it be that there is an absence of awareness on the matter of mental illness? Or, worse, could it be that we have declined to the level of savages and simply stopped caring for each other?
Then I thought about Botham who was shot dead by a female police officer as he relaxed in his Dallas apartment on September 6.
There has been an attempt to slur his character as a young, upstanding professional from the Caribbean, making his way in an otherwise hostile social and political environment in the United States. There is a further attempt to impose upon his case, easily recognisable, officially sanctioned racial prejudice, in order to diminish the severity of the eventual punishment his attacker should have to face.
I thought at the time of my cousin, Marcus, who was murdered in Bermuda in 2006, and the efforts by officials there to ignore/conceal clear evidence that could have easily led them to those who now stand accused after 12 years. Marcus was 32. Another young man. “Perhaps,” they wondered then, “he looked for it.”
But he is not our third subject today.
The other young man I am focusing on once had to use the mailing address of a friend, who lives in a “more respectable” community, in order to apply for a job. He lives, you see, in what officials and politicians call a criminal “hot spot”.
Some assert that he belongs to a “lost generation” and that the people of his community are collateral political damage and in need of either extinction or coerced repair. That he is guilty until proven innocent. “They,” he says to me, “are afraid of me.”
Whatshername would cross to the other side of the street when he walks through town. “They” follow him with their eyes in the mall.
His family asked him, despite his school certificates and associate degree, to cut his hair and to “look decent” at the interview. He needs to stress that he does not smoke, drink alcohol or use ganja. He grasps desperately at hope.
These are some of our young men in today’s world and I think about them every single day. There are people who believe they subsist outside our own realities. I want to suggest that they don’t.