Five murders around the Kadooment weekend, involving mostly young people, a shoot-out shortly after and many are asking, “Why de youts so angry?”
It’s a question elders have been asking since the beginning. After Cain killed Abel, Adam mussee turn to Eve and said: “I doan on’stan how dah boy get so vicious!” We are still asking the question thousands of years later.
A simple answer is that anything that is, is a result of what was.
Today is a product of yesterday. The youth are a reflection of their elders. Not a mirror reflection. Mirrors only show what is on the surface. The young are a deep penetrating mirror. The youth reveal the face we show, and the faces beneath the show-face. That is, unless they learn from us, how to show-face too.
We are taught to give the world the face that will make it give us back what we want. Little children can do little for us. And dey can’t do we nutten. They are only so cute for so long. Eventually they get bigger, and mouthier and more frustrating. Then they get our unedited face.
A lot of angry youths may be evidence of a lot of angry adults hiding behind a show-face. To ask why our young people are so angry may be to ask why we are so angry.
Because young people today seem to have so much more than young people of the past, some feel they should be less angry. Material comfort is not necessarily emotional comfort. What did your mother or father have to give up to give you food, clothing and shelter? Who did she have to show-face to? What frustrations did he have to hide during the daily grind, only to let them loose when he got home?
Stephen Marley, son of Bob Marley, has a lyric that goes, “My pop been on the rocks so long, (I) inherited a permanent screw.” Jamaicans have a reputation for aggression. Barbadians have a reputation for politeness and passivity. Could it be that the circumstances of history caused the evolution of a screw-face culture in Jamaica, while Barbados developed a show-face culture?
Permanent- screw vs permanent show: outright revolt vs subtle resistance. Neither could be the fullness and truth of who we are. They are strategies designed to deal with difficult circumstances.
Our forefathers sucked salt so that we could eat sugar. Great-great grandma slaved so that I could be more independent. The less you feel you have to depend on others, the less you feel you have to show-face. I have heard it said: “I want to get rich so I can tell everybody to go to hell.”
The coldness of first-world cities may be because the citizens are smug and secure enough to tell their neighbours to go to hell. As long as the security is not an illusion they can get away with it.
Recent generations of Bajans grew up with a level of security their ancestors did not. A security based on the feeling that Barbadians will be provided for. At one point we even held on to the promise of attaining developed-nation status.
These younger generations grew up feeling secure enough to not feel the need to show-face. The face they show is the one they learned in the privacy of our homes, the same face their peers show them in the intimacy of the playground, the face we think is necessary to show a child in order for her to learn.
Children are loving. You can tell them to go to hell, with your demeanour, your body language, the way you respond to them, and they will still come and cuddle up to you minutes after. At least, for a while.
They grow up. They learn to lash back. The severity with which they lash back corollates to the way in which they were lashed. And it may not be towards the person who did the initial lashing. They reflect the anger they are shown, either directly or at an angle.
In the past, flammable personalities were held tight in a bottled up society. The walls unchallenged convention held them in check. In a globalised age of mass media, our volatile gases leak into an atmosphere filled with the flames of outside influences. Something has to blow. The heat of anger, that in the past, would eventually cool, beams through social magnifying glasses.
A child in 1930, who had an angry parent or a whip-happy teacher, would burn off frustration playing for hours outside, in fresh air. Even if the anger persisted into adulthood, he knew that the ability to show good-face was a matter of eating or starving. He would keep his bad-face in check. His children would get it.
His great-grandchildren are coming of age. They have inherited a permanent screw. They reap the sweets of the old show-face tactics. But instead of burning off frustration in outdoor physical activity, they are concentrating it indoors and learning how to express it with violent video games, movies and music.
This generation may not be any angrier than any other at all. They may just feel secure enough to show it.
Add to that, the broken promise. No one is talking about developed-nation status now. We are feeling our third-worldness, even though the media is pushing the fantasy of luxury even harder in our young people’s faces, making the reality of everyday living appear pale and harsh in comparison.
If you are a young person, Barbados may seem like a broken promise. The face you feel in the moment, may be the only face you know how to show. If you are older, you may have developed some show-face skills to help you manage. But you may be deferring your anger onto the next generation.
Adrian Green is a creative communications specialist. Email [email protected]