If only we could save ghetto youths
Published:Sunday | April 29, 2018 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
The headline in The Sunday Gleaner of April 29, 2018, 'Tel Aviv held hostage by youngsters who don't know what they are fighting for', cast an immediate picture of a culture that affects not just ghetto boundaries with the attendant unrest there, but the party politics that divides.
There is almost a kind of romantic relationship with crime and violence in Jamaica - that living dangerously and walking the perilous tight rope, even while blood and murder is all around you, is ironically what inspires life and hope.
During an election campaign, the opposition supporters of whichever side wouldn't think a second before getting rid of you in the furtherance of their party's interests, even if yours go unaddressed.
War continues
So the youths continue the war, not by attempting to serve any kind of imagined justice but by merely becoming a new chain link in a generation of disgruntled ghetto people who themselves may have been unclear about the genesis of their own rage.
If children live what they learn, maybe the only way any unlearning of violence can happen is to separate that pure, clean and unaffected child from the revenge-touting, crime-infected adults of the ghetto.
HOMER SYLVESTER