No FEWER than five young Barbadians were brutally murdered in the 12-day holiday period between the December 22 and January 2. The horror started three days before Christmas when young Roderick Jones and Christopher Charles literally stabbed each other to death, and continued with a 17-year-old Barbadian teenager opening fire on a ZR van full of passengers and ending the life of Sheldon Taylor with a bullet.
We then proceeded to usher in our New Year with the slaying of 29-year-old Anderson Brathwaite in Cane Hill, St George, and with the equally senseless and brutal shooting death of young Adrian Nervais at Sargeant’s Village, Christ Church.
Barbadians need to ponder long and hard on the significance of these cold, ugly and undeniable social facts.
The reality is that if the murder rate continues at such a pace for a whole year, we would rack up no fewer than 152 murders. And this would be a per capita murder rate far in excess of Trinidad’s 500 per annum or Jamaica’s 1 000 per annum!
These murders, coming in the wake of the horrific Campus Trendz mass homicide of September 3, in which the lives of six young Barbadian women were extinguished, should clearly tell us that something is fundamentally wrong in our country.
But if something is fundamentally wrong in our nation, why are we not hearing the voices of our official leaders – our Prime Minister, our Attorney General, the Leader of the Opposition, the bishop of the Anglican Church, the head of the Christian Council, the chairman of our Private Sector Association and Congress of Trade Unions – addressing the sources and causes of the social disease and rallying Barbadians to mount a collective national response?
How is it that political parties and their functionaries can tell us that the major issue in the upcoming St John by-election will be the matter of the unfinished St John Polyclinic, when Barbadian youth are murdering each other at an alarming rate?
Does Hudson Griffith or Mara Thompson have anything at all to say on the issue of fratricidal violence and murder among the youth of Barbados?
Barbadians need to take their heads out of the sand and recognize that our nation has started to exhibit all of the social maladies associated with a society shaped by the value system and cultural imperatives of United States-based liberal capitalism.
The self-centredness, the psychological alienation, the lack of human empathy, the breakdown of a sense of community, the consumerist lifestyle, the enjoyment of entertainment based on violence and sensation, the dissipation of belief in a spiritual dimension and in transcendental spiritual values, are all embedded in the social, cultural, business and governance structures that Barbados’ private and public sector establishment have either actively promoted or acquiesced in over the past quarter century.
The bottom line is that Barbados is facing a deeply rooted problem that goes to the very foundations of our society and nation. If it is to be solved, it will call for enlightened and informed leadership on the part of individuals and organizations that genuinely care about this country and its people.
The PEP is ready, willing and able to play its part in finding and implementing relevant solutions.
