HOW CAN A PARENT OR A TEACHER share licks without being angry? It is a contradiction in terms. Anger adds to the application of licks.
Somebody in the newspapers is suggesting that when licks to the backside are applied, it must not be done in anger. How can you be smiling and tarring a youngster’s backside? Are you a sadist? Because only a sadist would laugh as the poor cretin is squirming in agony with the pain of strap meeting flesh. Surely sadism should not come into the picture. The youngster would be saying, “You beating me and laughing, this is sport to you as you insult me. Just wait until I could do something about it”.
If licks are applied with calmness in the eyes and face of the applier, they may be coming from a cold-hearted fish and lose the real intention of the applier. So to those who apply licks, the Wild Coot says, “Express your anger and do not be stingy with your words of disapproval.”
When everything else fails, licks are applied in order to correct a bad situation, and the lickee must be aware of the anger and disapproval on the face and of the words of the licker.
“I told you not to damage the Government’s buses when you coming home from school. Supposing they do not let you get on the bus, how you going to get home? Walk from Harrison College to East Point in St Philip? That is Mr Lashley’s bus and he has a responsibility for it.
“Your teacher ‘tell’ me that you carry to school a pair of scissors. What were you going to do with it?
“A boy always bullying me and I plan to juck out he eye.
“When you juck out he eye, how he gine see? Teacher also tell me that they catch you in the toilet with a boy. You is a homosexual? You gine bring same-sex marriage into this house and I want grandchildren?” Wacks!
That was an intersession that the Wild Coot heard while listening outside of a house of a friend at East Point, St Philip. When I confronted my friend some moments later, I advised him this way.
“Bossman, you lose either way. If you lick him, you could go to jail and cool your temper there, but he would have been alerted to the straight and narrow. If you do not lick him, you might end up holding your belly in grief when the news is conveyed to you that he shoot somebody or when somebody shoot he.”
Those who have read my book The Diary Of A Randy Old Coot would have read of the licks that Mr Solomon put in some fellows’ tail. Those same fellows attended his funeral and wept. They said that he taught them a lesson for life. They could still feel the licks. Fortunately, the Wild Coot did not have unruly children but he was the recipient of many a cut-tail at home, at elementary school and at secondary school – and on the rugby field.
A friend of mine told me that his son went to the United States and committed a heinous act. He rushed by plane to the police station and managed to get bail for the young man. As he exited the police station, right in front of the policemen he unbuckled his belt and dropped some licks in the young man’s backside that was sorrowful to watch. Right in front of the very people that advise against licking. And to their approval.
The debate on cutting tail continues. Some say that the uncut tail has not reduced the deviant behaviour in the foreign cities and schools. Copying them would not seem to help. Why is it that many of the older generation can recall how a good cut-tail changed their way of thinking and served as a lesson for life? Are the youngsters’ brains screwed on differently today? Is discipline in the home the critical factor? Even so, is there not a great divide between those who receive strict discipline at home and those who do not? The occasional force of the strap when talking failed, had accompanied most times the strict discipline at home. We are now also left with the debate about the effectiveness of hanging as a punishment for murder as gun murder flourishes.
On another note, AMBEV’s new offer may be $2.45 per share now that it has control. Therefore, do not count your chickens, and shares bought at $7 may be hard to sell.
• Harry Russell is a banker. Email quijote70@gmail.com