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Misguided youth in a terminally ill society
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, November 01, 2009
One week ago, the Sunday Observer's front-page story titled "Bus Porn", which reported on a two-week investigation of the open, adult-encouraged sexual behaviour of schoolchildren on public transportation, gave us more than a hint of what we should expect from a sizeable chunk of the next generation.
The story may not have been original, but due to the fact that the reporter stuck to the task for two weeks, travelled on buses and taxis on various routes and skilfully blended into the menagerie of misguided youngsters and sick and twisted adult drivers and conductors, gleefully egging them on, it brought into focus for us adults not just the rawness of it all, but the reality that we are creating another generation even worse than the one which created them.
The idea that sex between a man and a woman is sacrosanct probably died with the last generation. In our society it has become the norm in inner-city communities where a culture of 70 per cent to 80 per cent unemployment among the youth has made it the most easily sold or bartered commodity among undereducated young women. Many of the takers are 'respectable' married men from upper-class communities.
Some time during the late 1990s in the Grants Pen community, an eight-year-old child 'agreed' to have sex with a 36-year-old man in exchange for patties and a drink. On the way, the man picked up a male friend and later, after both had badly damaged her, the child ended up in the hospital. When an older woman told me about it with tears in her eyes, an acquaintance of mine who was in his 40s said, "Den a weh she did expect? She too beggy-beggy." When I began to chide him, he simply said, "Mark, yuh nuh understand how tings run yah so."
We have for too long flirted with so-called intellectuals giving 'cultural' embellishment to the worst of the worst in dancehall music and the actual dances. These unintelligent academicians have narrowed down the criticism of the genre to a 'middle-class versus poor people' thing.
If they are to be believed, the sex, the violence and the sexual violence in much of dancehall music is a reflection of a people expressing their love for what happens naturally, sex. I will give them that and admit that they are correct. But the cloistered academicians, with a need to falsify the closeness of the social distance between themselves and the 'wretched of the earth', tend to find beauty and romance in every dung pile and lyrical filth they come upon in the ghetto.
What they have stopped short of doing is telling us that not only do the DJs and music producers push these songs, but in doing so, too many of the songs openly encourage the very negative acts in the message.
Proper parenting in the ghetto is scarce, but there is nothing absolute about this because I have seen quiet wonders taking place in communities such as Trench Town with older women holding homework sessions with children on their verandahs. On Matthews Lane in downtown Kingston and Glendevon in Montego Bay I have met mothers who are just as concerned about their daughters' welfare as any parent from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens would be. The fathers, however, seem to operate below the radar.
But at dances in inner-city communities where the foul-mouthed DJs encourage the eager patrons to indulge themselves sexually - even in a few instances moving a bed to centre stage - sexual intercourse as coarse as one can get is cheered on with dozens of young children present. I am not saying that DJ music and dancehall is the genesis of the terrible breakdown in the society, but if the genre is discouraging children's exposure to adults' need for sexual exhibitionism then I am unaware of this effort.
This society was sick before dancehall music, but at some stage the music genre saw that the sickness was saleable and, powerful as it has been in its ability to carry a message (just ask the politicians), it has taken the message from behind the school gate and into the lives of our children.
But if the system is broken, as it is, and parents are too busy dolling up for dances, what do we do with misguided children whose parents neither have cars nor the time to ferry them to and from school?
Transit officers from a special police squad will have to marshal the children lap-dancing and having sex on buses. Laws must be instituted to haul the parents before the courts and subject them to hefty fines or community work. But as colleague columnist Betty Ann Blaine wrote recently, the focus cannot be just on the only parent present in the setting, the mother. In this respect, tough laws must be instituted to go after dead-beat dads who have been having a free ride for too long.
The same should go for middle-class parents who allow their underaged children to attend uptown nightclubs in this everything-is-everything Jamaica. In addition, the club should have its licence revoked.
Late one night in the late 1990s, a Christmas dance was being held by a community on Spanish Town Road. During the merriment a man was lawfully driving past while fire clappers were being exploded. Believing that they were gunshots, he sped up and in the process hit down a pedestrian. The foolish man stopped.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
<span style="font-style: italic">Les Green calls it as it is</span>
That there are rogue cops in the JCF and some of them are closely connected to the dangerous trade in illicit drugs is common knowledge.
There was even a time during the 1990s when a certain corporal ('A') became so powerful because of his close links to and involvement in the drug trade and his ability to make senior officers 'eat a food' that he was a law onto himself. No 'bwoy' in the hierarchy could order him around.
During a 'police' operation, drugs were taken from a well-connected 'ruler of the streets' and word was sent out that,"Di big man want back him tings."
The cop who had led the operation decided that, with his connections, he could circumvent the 'big man' and do his own sale and/or distribution. At the same time, another rogue cop ('B') who had similar ambitions visited the first cop's residence, held him up at gunpoint and stole the expropriated drugs which, in the first place, should have been in a vault in care of the state.
Matters began to tumble out of control. Although cop 'A' was powerful, the pugnacious nature of 'B' was making it difficult for him to get back "fi him tings". It was not as if he could lodge a complaint to the police. But he was a smart man.
One day an actual police operation began as gunmen from a troubled community fired on a police patrol. Cop 'A' was quick to the area and through a crony requested that cop 'B' - who was known to be quite handy in shoot-outs, especially when he was under the influence of the very stuff he had stolen - come immediately to the scene. His presence in these chilling shoot-outs usually gave lesser cops a boost in confidence as he was known as fearless and trigger-happy.
It was never quite determined whose bullet eventually took the life of cop 'B', but those in the know at the time never did believe the story that 'B' was shot by gunmen. Cop 'A' got back the stolen items but in the end, the drugs had to be given back to the 'real big man' and 'A' was allowed to live.
<span style="font-style: italic">Final cost? One cop killed by 'gunmen'.</span>
One day in the late 1970s, a supervisor on the docks became suspicious about activities involving an outbound 20-foot container. One dock worker was always 'checking' it when he should have been at his post in the dock office. The supervisor also noticed that the original seal was skilfully tampered with.
The supervisor reported the matter to his boss and the container was opened. Although the packages were tightly sealed, the smell of ganja was overpowering. It was immediately closed and the police called in.
One member of the police team which arrived was a police photographer who did his bit then numbered the packages and photographed them again before they were removed from the docks and taken to a certain police station.
About six months later, another domestic outbound container began to attract the attention of another dock supervisor. By that time the vigilance had increased because the US authorities had begun to levy enormous fines on vessels arriving in docks along the Eastern seaboard and in the Gulf whenever drugs were found on them.
The container was opened and again tightly sealed packages of ganja for export were found. The police were summoned. As the police photographer arrived and began to take pictures, the first words uttered out of his mouth were, "Hold on, don't mi tek picture of dem ting yah aready?"
Conclusion? Some rogue members of the police force were re-exporting the drugs which were previously seized and ought to have been in their custody pending full processing.
A few years ago when the British cops arrived in Jamaica there were many of us who allowed nationalism to get in the way of good sense. Many of us were too ashamed to admit that we had messed up, could not clean our own stables and in fact, preferred to live with the stink because, after all, it was our stink.
When reality kicked in, we began to note that the high-profile Mark Shields, Justin Felice and Les Green had brought a level of trust in the police and the hierarchy that had been fading fast in the years before their arrival.
They had no entrenched interests in the Jamaican underworld or big business and as a result they owed no one any favours and had no axes to grind. As Jamaicans we felt the shame that it had to take outsiders and, worse, those coming from our recent colonisers to teach us how to begin the trek to regain the trust in our institutions we should have secured on the day after independence in 1962.
Now DCP Les Green has stated that some cops lost their lives as a result of their involvement in the illicit drugs trade. In other words, it was as a result of deals gone sour. Gasping in the smog of what is left of a viable polity, the chairman of the Police Federation has criticised Mr Green and called for his resignation. A hollow call it has been and a most shameful one.
There are three reasons for saying this. First, one must assume that Green did not suddenly discover this. Second, in him using the word 'some', is it not fair to assume that he did not mean 'one cop'? Third, when high officials make statements like the one Les Green issued, usually it is done after failure to gain traction on solutions from those behind the scenes. In my view, Green was taking a last stand in making an appeal to the public to help rid the force of corrupt cops.
The head of the Police Federation is essentially the head of a workers' union, and like most union heads rational thought must always give way to pandering to those whom he represents. He ought to know that we have long gone past the days when it was fashionable in genteel settings to say, "There are only a few rotten eggs in the police force." We have long gone past that to the systemic rot which presently exists, and in the fight against organised crime the biggest bugbear is corruption inside the police force.
Years before uptown discovered that there were more than a few bad eggs stinking up the JCF, the little man at street level could tell you that, 'Police sah? Dem a law onto demself.'
Based on my personal interface with Commissioner Lewin, I have no reason to believe he is anything other than the change agent that many say he is. But he has to deal with entrenched political interests, which is tightly woven into the criminal tapestry of organised crime, especially as it relates to drug running and the local extortion racket - both of which involves liberal use of the gun.
Can we ease the tension?
Am I alone in the belief that one day, pretty soon, this nation will get up one morning to the 'sound' of a huge joint security operation with the Jamaican security forces and a US force assisting US marshals stationed at the US Embassy?
One online contributor with close links to global security operations wrote, in relation to a Gleaner column written weeks ago by Rev Devon Dick, that 'Dudus' will have his day in court.
"This is all a massive load of useless stuff coming from Devon Dick. As I understand it, 'Dudus' will not really have his day in the Jamaican courts. When a prima facie case is being made against a defendant, he and his legal team, though present, do not participate in the process. It is on the strength of the extradition request, that is, the prosecution's case and the evidence, minus the witnesses, that the resident magistrate agrees or disagrees on extradition. On that basis his chances appear dark. The US Marshals' office at the US Embassy in Kingston has done its homework and operatives there will not divulge the Jamaican witness list for fear of reprisals against them, and although he was freed of charges in the Jamaican courts in 1994 and 1997, they would already have had the transcripts of those cases.
"The Government obfuscation tactic of requesting a list of co-conspirators, most of whom would have already struck deals with US authorities to save their own skins, is a lame, hopeless and bankrupt ploy."
[email protected]
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, November 01, 2009
One week ago, the Sunday Observer's front-page story titled "Bus Porn", which reported on a two-week investigation of the open, adult-encouraged sexual behaviour of schoolchildren on public transportation, gave us more than a hint of what we should expect from a sizeable chunk of the next generation.
The story may not have been original, but due to the fact that the reporter stuck to the task for two weeks, travelled on buses and taxis on various routes and skilfully blended into the menagerie of misguided youngsters and sick and twisted adult drivers and conductors, gleefully egging them on, it brought into focus for us adults not just the rawness of it all, but the reality that we are creating another generation even worse than the one which created them.
The idea that sex between a man and a woman is sacrosanct probably died with the last generation. In our society it has become the norm in inner-city communities where a culture of 70 per cent to 80 per cent unemployment among the youth has made it the most easily sold or bartered commodity among undereducated young women. Many of the takers are 'respectable' married men from upper-class communities.
Some time during the late 1990s in the Grants Pen community, an eight-year-old child 'agreed' to have sex with a 36-year-old man in exchange for patties and a drink. On the way, the man picked up a male friend and later, after both had badly damaged her, the child ended up in the hospital. When an older woman told me about it with tears in her eyes, an acquaintance of mine who was in his 40s said, "Den a weh she did expect? She too beggy-beggy." When I began to chide him, he simply said, "Mark, yuh nuh understand how tings run yah so."
We have for too long flirted with so-called intellectuals giving 'cultural' embellishment to the worst of the worst in dancehall music and the actual dances. These unintelligent academicians have narrowed down the criticism of the genre to a 'middle-class versus poor people' thing.
If they are to be believed, the sex, the violence and the sexual violence in much of dancehall music is a reflection of a people expressing their love for what happens naturally, sex. I will give them that and admit that they are correct. But the cloistered academicians, with a need to falsify the closeness of the social distance between themselves and the 'wretched of the earth', tend to find beauty and romance in every dung pile and lyrical filth they come upon in the ghetto.
What they have stopped short of doing is telling us that not only do the DJs and music producers push these songs, but in doing so, too many of the songs openly encourage the very negative acts in the message.
Proper parenting in the ghetto is scarce, but there is nothing absolute about this because I have seen quiet wonders taking place in communities such as Trench Town with older women holding homework sessions with children on their verandahs. On Matthews Lane in downtown Kingston and Glendevon in Montego Bay I have met mothers who are just as concerned about their daughters' welfare as any parent from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens would be. The fathers, however, seem to operate below the radar.
But at dances in inner-city communities where the foul-mouthed DJs encourage the eager patrons to indulge themselves sexually - even in a few instances moving a bed to centre stage - sexual intercourse as coarse as one can get is cheered on with dozens of young children present. I am not saying that DJ music and dancehall is the genesis of the terrible breakdown in the society, but if the genre is discouraging children's exposure to adults' need for sexual exhibitionism then I am unaware of this effort.
This society was sick before dancehall music, but at some stage the music genre saw that the sickness was saleable and, powerful as it has been in its ability to carry a message (just ask the politicians), it has taken the message from behind the school gate and into the lives of our children.
But if the system is broken, as it is, and parents are too busy dolling up for dances, what do we do with misguided children whose parents neither have cars nor the time to ferry them to and from school?
Transit officers from a special police squad will have to marshal the children lap-dancing and having sex on buses. Laws must be instituted to haul the parents before the courts and subject them to hefty fines or community work. But as colleague columnist Betty Ann Blaine wrote recently, the focus cannot be just on the only parent present in the setting, the mother. In this respect, tough laws must be instituted to go after dead-beat dads who have been having a free ride for too long.
The same should go for middle-class parents who allow their underaged children to attend uptown nightclubs in this everything-is-everything Jamaica. In addition, the club should have its licence revoked.
Late one night in the late 1990s, a Christmas dance was being held by a community on Spanish Town Road. During the merriment a man was lawfully driving past while fire clappers were being exploded. Believing that they were gunshots, he sped up and in the process hit down a pedestrian. The foolish man stopped.
It was the DJ on the mike who directly encouraged what subsequently took place. The man was taken from the car and badly beaten, then to the chants of "kill him, bun it up!" they placed him back inside the car and set afire. That was the power of the DJ.
But, of course, if we are to believe the cloistered set, that was just poor people expressing themselves.
<span style="font-style: italic">Les Green calls it as it is</span>
That there are rogue cops in the JCF and some of them are closely connected to the dangerous trade in illicit drugs is common knowledge.
There was even a time during the 1990s when a certain corporal ('A') became so powerful because of his close links to and involvement in the drug trade and his ability to make senior officers 'eat a food' that he was a law onto himself. No 'bwoy' in the hierarchy could order him around.
During a 'police' operation, drugs were taken from a well-connected 'ruler of the streets' and word was sent out that,"Di big man want back him tings."
The cop who had led the operation decided that, with his connections, he could circumvent the 'big man' and do his own sale and/or distribution. At the same time, another rogue cop ('B') who had similar ambitions visited the first cop's residence, held him up at gunpoint and stole the expropriated drugs which, in the first place, should have been in a vault in care of the state.
Matters began to tumble out of control. Although cop 'A' was powerful, the pugnacious nature of 'B' was making it difficult for him to get back "fi him tings". It was not as if he could lodge a complaint to the police. But he was a smart man.
One day an actual police operation began as gunmen from a troubled community fired on a police patrol. Cop 'A' was quick to the area and through a crony requested that cop 'B' - who was known to be quite handy in shoot-outs, especially when he was under the influence of the very stuff he had stolen - come immediately to the scene. His presence in these chilling shoot-outs usually gave lesser cops a boost in confidence as he was known as fearless and trigger-happy.
It was never quite determined whose bullet eventually took the life of cop 'B', but those in the know at the time never did believe the story that 'B' was shot by gunmen. Cop 'A' got back the stolen items but in the end, the drugs had to be given back to the 'real big man' and 'A' was allowed to live.
<span style="font-style: italic">Final cost? One cop killed by 'gunmen'.</span>
One day in the late 1970s, a supervisor on the docks became suspicious about activities involving an outbound 20-foot container. One dock worker was always 'checking' it when he should have been at his post in the dock office. The supervisor also noticed that the original seal was skilfully tampered with.
The supervisor reported the matter to his boss and the container was opened. Although the packages were tightly sealed, the smell of ganja was overpowering. It was immediately closed and the police called in.
One member of the police team which arrived was a police photographer who did his bit then numbered the packages and photographed them again before they were removed from the docks and taken to a certain police station.
About six months later, another domestic outbound container began to attract the attention of another dock supervisor. By that time the vigilance had increased because the US authorities had begun to levy enormous fines on vessels arriving in docks along the Eastern seaboard and in the Gulf whenever drugs were found on them.
The container was opened and again tightly sealed packages of ganja for export were found. The police were summoned. As the police photographer arrived and began to take pictures, the first words uttered out of his mouth were, "Hold on, don't mi tek picture of dem ting yah aready?"
Conclusion? Some rogue members of the police force were re-exporting the drugs which were previously seized and ought to have been in their custody pending full processing.
A few years ago when the British cops arrived in Jamaica there were many of us who allowed nationalism to get in the way of good sense. Many of us were too ashamed to admit that we had messed up, could not clean our own stables and in fact, preferred to live with the stink because, after all, it was our stink.
When reality kicked in, we began to note that the high-profile Mark Shields, Justin Felice and Les Green had brought a level of trust in the police and the hierarchy that had been fading fast in the years before their arrival.
They had no entrenched interests in the Jamaican underworld or big business and as a result they owed no one any favours and had no axes to grind. As Jamaicans we felt the shame that it had to take outsiders and, worse, those coming from our recent colonisers to teach us how to begin the trek to regain the trust in our institutions we should have secured on the day after independence in 1962.
Now DCP Les Green has stated that some cops lost their lives as a result of their involvement in the illicit drugs trade. In other words, it was as a result of deals gone sour. Gasping in the smog of what is left of a viable polity, the chairman of the Police Federation has criticised Mr Green and called for his resignation. A hollow call it has been and a most shameful one.
There are three reasons for saying this. First, one must assume that Green did not suddenly discover this. Second, in him using the word 'some', is it not fair to assume that he did not mean 'one cop'? Third, when high officials make statements like the one Les Green issued, usually it is done after failure to gain traction on solutions from those behind the scenes. In my view, Green was taking a last stand in making an appeal to the public to help rid the force of corrupt cops.
The head of the Police Federation is essentially the head of a workers' union, and like most union heads rational thought must always give way to pandering to those whom he represents. He ought to know that we have long gone past the days when it was fashionable in genteel settings to say, "There are only a few rotten eggs in the police force." We have long gone past that to the systemic rot which presently exists, and in the fight against organised crime the biggest bugbear is corruption inside the police force.
Years before uptown discovered that there were more than a few bad eggs stinking up the JCF, the little man at street level could tell you that, 'Police sah? Dem a law onto demself.'
Based on my personal interface with Commissioner Lewin, I have no reason to believe he is anything other than the change agent that many say he is. But he has to deal with entrenched political interests, which is tightly woven into the criminal tapestry of organised crime, especially as it relates to drug running and the local extortion racket - both of which involves liberal use of the gun.
Can we ease the tension?
Am I alone in the belief that one day, pretty soon, this nation will get up one morning to the 'sound' of a huge joint security operation with the Jamaican security forces and a US force assisting US marshals stationed at the US Embassy?
One online contributor with close links to global security operations wrote, in relation to a Gleaner column written weeks ago by Rev Devon Dick, that 'Dudus' will have his day in court.
"This is all a massive load of useless stuff coming from Devon Dick. As I understand it, 'Dudus' will not really have his day in the Jamaican courts. When a prima facie case is being made against a defendant, he and his legal team, though present, do not participate in the process. It is on the strength of the extradition request, that is, the prosecution's case and the evidence, minus the witnesses, that the resident magistrate agrees or disagrees on extradition. On that basis his chances appear dark. The US Marshals' office at the US Embassy in Kingston has done its homework and operatives there will not divulge the Jamaican witness list for fear of reprisals against them, and although he was freed of charges in the Jamaican courts in 1994 and 1997, they would already have had the transcripts of those cases.
"The Government obfuscation tactic of requesting a list of co-conspirators, most of whom would have already struck deals with US authorities to save their own skins, is a lame, hopeless and bankrupt ploy."
[email protected]