Mark Wignall | Children, guns and mental trauma

It was sometime in the 1950s and I was about eight years old. For about four years, I was in the care of the Wallaces in Clapham, Moneague and these total strangers treated me like royalty.

A part of the daily routine was to collect milk in the early morning. A youngster my own age and I would trek through the Moneague fog and the delightfully cold weather to a place called Haddon where we would collect a gallon of fresh milk (in a tightly closed tin). The milk generated just about everything around a healthy breakfast.

At the time, rumours were swirling about two notorious criminals on the loose, ‘Gabbidon’ and ‘Henry’. While walking through a pasture of cows with newly born calves and bulls ready to rush us, through the thick soup of the fog, we saw what our young minds registered as two men with guns.

Fear gave us wings. We dropped the milk and ran off in a panic. When we reached, we were almost totally out of breath in telling the adults in the house about Gabbidon and Henry coming at us with guns. While we were relating the story, they came up on horseback. Two spray men on duty controlling mosquitoes. They all had a good laugh and the men were thoughtful enough to replace the milk.

Things have radically changed since those times where the main duties of adults were the nurturing of all the children in a community. Today, it is common for too many young children growing up in dense, troubled communities to be around guns. Worse they are given the guns and are usually around where their bigger brothers are cleaning them or boasting about their new possessions.

At present, nothing bothers me as much as schoolchildren drawing blood with each other and in our nation looking on (with major concern or none) and pretending that the incident is indicative of a great revelation when many of us have seen it before and have heard the mouth fixes of the past.

It is even worse when our girls are involved. Gentle, dainty little ladies. When did they learn to be like cute little savages. One male principal of an all-age school had to adopt the final resolution to what he initially saw as an intractable problem when I presented him with the shocker that a 10-year-old schoolboy was pimping out a number of schoolgirls.

When it turned out that the boy’s mother was a prostitute and she had taken a hands-off attitude, he was forced to expel the youngster. Two of the girls (now grown women) have gone on to do fairly well in life while four left school illiterate. Unfortunately, there are not enough good stories to go around when harsh reality strikes.

NEVER BET AGAINST PAULA LLEWELLYN

If you are an orator par excellence and you are booked to give a presentation/speech at a function at which the director of public prosecutions (DPP) will also be presenting, take my advice, give plausible excuses and run to the hills. If you are brave enough to weather the hazard, no one will remember anything you say.

Two Fridays ago, the lady spoke at the annual conference at a Restorative Justice gathering held at the Terra Nova Hotel and she held the attendees spellbound. The lady has that rare gift of being able to intertwine her oratory with fascinating anecdotes from her professional life in the courts and around it.

Last week, the DPP told Nationwide, as she explained the controversy over Nzinga King, who complained that in an interaction with the police, her Rasta locks were forcibly cut.

Many of us in the society had allowed our societal bias to come down hard in favour of the young lady and, even after the Nationwide interview, I am certain there are still some who are willing to believe everything Ms King said.

But the DPP broke down the case into the many complexities that it is and assisted many of us to do a slower re-weaving than we normally would. Most cases that pass through our courts are never as easy as ‘cut and dried’ as we would like to make them out to be. The DPP satisfied me that what will appear obvious to some may not be obvious to many others, and those are the things we ought to consider. We must leave our societal biases at the door of the courthouse.

I have a few business friends who believe that the DPP is an enemy of the State. It is either that they have lost in the courts against her or, more likely, they have cases pending and seemingly growing beards in some dank file in a basement storage.

But she also has her admirers as the chief prosecutor in the island. And, by the way, if you were brave enough to give that speech and you said something that you believe ought to be saved for posterity, there is a good chance that someone will say the DPP said it.

NORANDA AND SMALL SPACE FOR MINING

“By any reasonable standards, the significant further reduction of mining lands permitted by NEPA in the already reduced Special Mining Lease (SML-173) is a meaningful conservatory step. We accept this as an intended good act of conservation, even if detrimental to the future business longevity of Noranda Jamaica Bauxite Partners II in Jamaica.”

Thus stated a release from the bauxite entity dated February 8, 2022. When I spoke with Mark Hansen from Noranda, he confirmed that the Special Mining Lease is in its third phase. It was at 8,335 hectares, then it went down to 1,324 hectares. Of this amount, only 254 hectares will be set aside for the development of roads and mining activities. He stressed that no mining, even in this severely reduced space, will be near the Cockpit Country Protected Area or near any Maroon communities.

Hansen told me that his company is not in any negotiation at this time with NEPA (National Environment and Planning Agency) for any other parcel of lands. He also stressed that the 254 hectares is exclusively in St Ann and is not close to any Maroon lands.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.