Let's foster values to make us human

THE EDITOR: There is a tragic irony about the fear which the recent shooting spree on the boardwalk in Chaguaramas has generated in our now hapless people when compared with the suggestion of fun and romance under the boardwalk which The Drifters had captured in their classic of the 60s, Under the Boardwalk: “Under the boardwalk/ Down by the sea/ On a blanket with my baby/ That’s where I’ll be.”

The boardwalk for the Drifters in that song was a place to escape to experience forbidden love; for our people our boardwalk is a place to escape from if we want to live.

There is something unique about our boardwalk shooting spree. People are being killed everywhere at will, it is true, but this killing is different, for there seemed to have been an indifference to the slaughter of the innocents that is mind-boggling.

If even the shooters had cause, bad as that is, didn’t they feel a sense of wrong over possibly taking the lives of people who were in no way connected to their motive? That sense of wrong is what makes us human, for even in our vulnerability as humans we sometimes feel that we have to wrong others, that sense of conscience that will have grown in us through the family, the school, the church and the like, would have likely caused us to hold our hand.

But it didn’t in this instance, and I am mystified at this mindset that is hardly human and what may have produced it. Surely the would-be criminal would have benefitted from the values generated by our traditional institutions while growing up. But is it because the “wrong and consequence syndrome” which would have been an integral part of that value system has been allowed to lapse during adulthood because of a malfunctioning judicial system?

Had that behavioural pattern of youth, of knowing that there is a consequence to wrongdoing, been reinforced during adulthood by a functioning judicial system in its varied manifestations such as the police, the courts and by a just application of the law, is it not reasonable to assume that the shooters at the boardwalk would have held their hand, knowing that the innocents would be hurt?

Criminality as we know it in this country is a pervasive mindset that has been allowed to fester because of a judicial system which has failed to foster as a given the tenet that there is a consequence to criminal behaviour, and has now become “gangrenous” because of the myriad social problems which feed on it.

The response of the minister to the boardwalk shooting is merely a plaster on a gaping, infected wound. The solution can only be found in using our institutions to foster values that would make us more human, rational and conscionable, moving us away from that which is bestial, irrational and downright evil.

DR ERROL BENJAMIN

docbenj742@outlook.com