Pardon Me While I Vent

After reading Hayden's post Blah Blah Blah, it took me back to an unpleasant time and place early last year. I wrote about the experience and published it in my block's newsletter. Its title is "Pardon Me While I Vent"...

I saw Robert about a month and a half ago. He was outside his mother’s pastry store with a friend on that Sunday night, sitting on his pick-up, listening to music blaring from its speakers. The next time I saw him was last Sunday… he was well dressed, but only he didn’t dress himself, and thankfully his two bullet wounds were below his neck, so they didn’t show. He was 21 years old. I cringed as I looked at his pale, discoloured face, and I began to wonder if it really happened. In fact, I haven’t stopped wondering. We’d known each other since we were little, went to school together, did karate together… we were not best friends, nor were we near to that, but I knew him well enough to know that he shouldn’t be six feet under right now.

And then it angers me, not only that he’s dead, but that he’s been gunned down, an all too common scenario in Jamaica. And then I think about the general trend in our country, men and boys walking around with knives in their back pocket, and then I’m angered even more. Everybody wants to be ‘bad’, as if the possession of a knife or the ability to use it makes you any more dangerous than any other knife-carrying ignoramous. I’m left to wonder what makes so many people unable to manage without their metal companion; is it that you have to be so prepared for some inevitable war every day, even here on campus? I witnessed an altercation in a bus terminus one day recently, and both men drew their ratchets. One man bragged, “A seven years me spen’ a prison bwoy, an’ mi nuh ‘fraid fi go back.” That’s the sort of attitude that bugs me- one has to go to whatever lengths necessary to prove a point, and a useless point, I might add- that I’m ‘badder’ than you.

But the most sickening point of it all is the final outcome. It’s blatantly clear what a knife or a gun can do to you. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to leave life-taking to God. After all, He is the only One able to give life back, right? It seems a heavy load, especially for people like me who actually have a conscience, to so easily and thoughtlessly take the life of another. After all, a life lost can never be regained. But we don’t seem to care. So even the most educated and privileged among us have to brandish our weapons. But then one day it becomes more than that. One day, an argument about stepping on a toe, or about owing money, or about whose girl she is, becomes physical, and the end result is Robert- a young, lifeless body, never to be seen or heard from again. And it leads me to wonder- whatever the problem may be, whatever beef they may have had, or whatever it was that the man wanted to steal from Robert’s house- was it really worth his life???