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Shootings, choppings and rumours of shootings and choppings. Who to blame?
Once, we would have answered the question with a story about the influence of the media, gangster music in hip-hop and dancehall specifically. Rap groups like NWA promoted the lifestyle of African-American street gangs better than Carlton and A-1 promoted Proppa Pork. Dancehall artists like Bounty Killa painted pictures of merciless gunmanism with a poetic lyricism that old English bards would envy.
But white teens were buying gangster rap more than black teens were, yet not having the same levels of violent crime. Bad-boy tunes were beloved by bad-boy dancehall fans and good-boy dancehall fans alike.
It couldn’t simply be the music to blame. There had to be another source.
Before NWA took gangster rap to another level, youth were looking up to gangsters of the silver screen.
The actor Al Pacino, playing the iconic role of Cuban-American drug kingpin Scarface, was a drug dealing, gangster role model long before NWA existed.
A generation before Bounty Killa, Jamaican dancehall artists had names like Audie Murphy and Johnny Ringo, patterning themselves after their favourite actors and outlaws from the old-time cowboy movies. Is it Hollywood to blame then? Many of us grew up watching thousands of acts of violence on TV and film. We didn’t become murderers.
Could it be that the problem was that some children did not have the counterbalancing force of proper parental guidance to offset negative media imagery? Is the problem in the home?
This answer is not good enough either, too obvious and too broad to be useful.
What exactly is the problem in the home? It couldn’t be that the children were not getting enough licks. We know too many badmen dat get beat bad, bad by dey mudda for that to be it. Could it be the rise in ganja use? We know too many successful rasta families for that to be it either. But maybe we are getting closer to home with this issue. The operative word in “rasta family” may be “family.” The breakdown in family structure could be key. But we have to go even deeper.
Some have argued that teenage pregnancy and single-parent homes are nothing new. What may be new is the lack of extended family and community support. Individualism, consumerism and materialism make work and party take priority over family and community. Bring back into the picture the intensified external cultural influences from the mass media and the Internet, and the isolating tendency of social media, add to that an economic depression, and you have a perfect storm of a social crisis.
The question then becomes: Who is responsible for allowing the culture and society to become so deeply influenced and degraded? Once upon a very recent time, my story would have ended with fingers pointed at the politicians. The people charged with guiding the society and with the shaping of the direction of the culture would have gotten all the licks some wish the children would get.
Not so much for dropping the ball as for packing it up and carrying it home.
This bad ball handling is not limited to the last administration. The roots of our problems are buried much deeper than the last ten years.
But, like blaming the home environment, this is also too obvious and too simplistic. Our politicians come from among us, from within our homes.
They did not drop out of the sky. To indict them is to indict ourselves. We all are survivors of the colonial holocaust.
What is clear is that our situation is complex, multifaceted and deeply rooted.
We are generations deep into broken homes, broken politics and a fractured culture. We will not hang our way out of this. We can try to execute violent perpetrators faster than we produce them but without adequately assessing the production line, Dodds will be less able to hold the volume of our sociocultural mess than the Mangrove landfill.
It will take a national effort to dig us out. Drop your trident and pick up a shovel. The question is no longer who is to blame but who will take responsibility.
The situation may seem bleak, but it is far from too far gone.
Adrian Green is a communications specialist.
Email: [email protected] ”
Adrian Green
