Kristen Gyles | Violence in, violence out!

“What we think, we become.” We like to repeat it, but our application of this old adage is very selective.

Our governments over the years have made various crime-fighting efforts – many of which simply have not addressed the root causes of crime. Resultantly, crime rages on.

Many criminals begin their ‘career’ of crime in their youth and with the crime statistics in most other countries being incomparable to ours, there must be something about the Jamaican climate that influences so many of our young people to choose the path of crime. I am pretty sure I know what it is. And those who are honest with themselves perhaps already know also.

With warmongers as role models, our young people will obviously drift into a mindless state of revering crime. No one has a problem accepting that abusive words, when repeated to any child on a continuous basis, will have lifelong negative effects on the psychological development of that child.

Somehow, though, we have a problem accepting that a child who has the tuneful melodies of Blood a go run like Dunn’s River Falls and Marrow fly go a foreign ringing in their ears all day is being negatively influenced. With influential artistes boasting about how they commit murders in ‘broad daylight’, it is so obvious why Jamaica suffers from an overwhelming crime rate.

It is abundantly clear that our children will drift along into any old stupid fad that these artistes invent.

In 2010, perhaps the most renowned dancehall artiste at the time released the hit song Clarks. Schoolboys and girls alike started saving up their patty and bag juice money to get themselves a pair. To this day, the shoes still maintain their ‘cool’ status. After all, many popular artistes still wear the shoes.

Not very long after Clarks came the crowning moment of the bleaching epidemic – the hit song Cake Soap released by the same artiste.

As a high-schooler at the time, I remember very vividly how the song took Jamaica by storm. Every high school must have had their own ‘wash face’ crew who would cordon off the bathroom sinks, pushing the first-form ‘freshers’ out of the bathroom if they dared challenge them for any of the pipes. Students who never even seemed to bathe daily all of a sudden started coming to school armed with a cake soap just to wash their face.

It was at that point I started to worry for my generation.

CHILDREN NEED GUIDANCE

There is always some ‘Gaza’ fan that chimes in with the note that our youth’s sheepish allegiance to this particular artiste only speaks to his ‘amazing’ talent and influence and not so much the willingness of our people to follow every new craze. A chance of me considering this position existed up until a fairly new dancehall artiste released a song in which he gloated about being ‘fully dunce’.

One would think our astute generation of intellectually savvy young people would be able to decipher between his foolishness and real life. But ‘reconably’, some youngsters got caught up in the almshouse, and I am told some started burning their birth certificates and doing other ‘dunce’ things in a bid to join the dunce bus.

The truth, is children need guidance. And while we don’t all agree on what this guidance should look like, we should all be able to agree that birth certificates are important and that being dunce won’t get us very far. We should also be able to agree that having a ‘gun that burst every night of the week’ will also not get us very far – at least not further than the nearest jailhouse.

Why then are we so apathetic about the wicked and reprobate lyrics that our artistes spew out at our children? When ‘Uncle Demon’ is allowed to infiltrate the minds of our young people, why are we so confused about the country’s inordinate crime statistics? We say we are serious about fighting crime but that really isn’t apparent.

When our young people have these depraved lyrics drilling into their brains, while they are walking, talking, eating, sleeping, and even while they claim to be studying, their minds are being drained of not only things like compassion and sympathy but also common sense. We all know this intuitively. It is common sense. Unfortunately, some adults themselves have been meditating on the same ‘music’ so by now, they have none.

Children live what they learn and if what they learn from their role models is violence, violence is what they will live.

Garbage in, garbage out! Violence in, violence out!

Kristen Gyles is an educator. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com