The Promise of Youth

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

If we added up the ages of the last four murdered teen males, the combined total would be that of a middle age man.

At this rate we are producing a homicidal equation in which we can increasingly divide the number of men over 40, by the number of boys under 20, preternaturally preceding their mommies and daddies to the grave.

The numbers are especially bad when you compare them with the average life span for Bahamian males: approximately 68 years.

This is a zero-sum lottery with tragic results. It involves a version of Russian roulette in which many of our boys try to game how many fights or how much dissing it takes to rack up a fatal stabbing or shooting.

Unlike traditional Russian roulette, our version carves twin notches on knife-blades and bullets: the one who succumbs to an unexpected penalty of death and the one now facing the death penalty.

Though it is unnatural for a parent to bury a child, there are unnatural seasons such as war, famine and natural disaster. War strips innocents, Third World child conscripts and First World teen soldiers, of their lifeblood.

Famine feasts on hungry babes. And still we mourn with parents whose offspring are entombed in unmarked graves by an earthquake and aftershocks in China and a monsoon in Myanmar less brutal than that country’s military kleptocracy.

At home, our youth are not being killed by the plagues of war, famine and natural disaster. Instead, there is another form of pestilence, of our own making, of male killers with manly torsos, yet often driven by abbreviated childhoods and adolescent mentalities.

At summer’s eve, with 2008’s half-year mark not yet passed, almost every fortnight or so, we mourn with family, friends and fellow-citizens who dust their children’s coffins with petals, tears and native soil.

This spiral of violence bleeds through school yards and malls, onto Bay Street and Paradise Island, into Nassau Village and villages throughout the country -- though mainly within the confines of our Manhattan-sized capital island.

When these incidents initially appeared, mostly at night, in Off Broadway neighbourhoods, they were easier to ignore or dismiss as worrisome – but, not-in-my-backyard.

Now that such violence regularly erupts, often during matinee hours in many of our most public spaces, and attracts marquee headlines, a wider audience is paying rapt attention.

The Off Broadway production, “Why Are THEY Killing Each Other?” has been vaulted to church sanctuaries, government offices, corporate suites and gated living rooms as, “OUR Children Are Dying!”

This addictive violence has no panaceas. It requires longitudinal and latitudinal responses. It flows from social conditions and individual responsibility, or lack thereof.

Such violence will not yield to policy placebos, posturing politicians, or pontificating pastors. While the murder of a single Bahamian son or daughter is a tragedy, the spate of recent murders is a national nightmare and a disgrace.

It robs those murdered, and their killers -- also usually in their teen years -- of the promise of youth. It also robs the nation of the promise of their youthful energy.

Still, the greater majority of our young people are not involved in the destructive violence perpetuated by a significant minority of disconnected, disinterested and dismissed youth.

While there has been an alarming increase in violent incidents connected to various junior and secondary schools, many of these same institutions have also experienced a growing number of success stories.

One public junior high invited the media to Prize Day to witness the expanding number of their students exemplifying academic and athletic excellence. The media failed to attend, but were quick to telephone the school about a rumoured fight which proved more phantom than fact.

At a recent event honouring finalists in the National Primary School Student of the Year Competition, Dr. Keva Bethel lamented the trickle of positive stories the media tend to produce regarding Bahamian youth.

Ironically, the lack of greater coverage of the often enterprising biographies of many of the finalists demonstrated the concerns of this highly regarded former president of the College of The Bahamas.

Unfortunately, some of this flows from a press often more reliant on publicity packets than pavement pounding, and sometimes driven more by sensational anecdotes rather than seasoned analysis.

The media are not required to balance bad news with good news. We do not want our news filtered through rose-coloured glasses -- or jaundiced lenses.

But they do have a civic obligation to tell more of the news, beyond the increasingly prurient and sensational tabloid-like headlines which are often misleading, especially after reading the stories that follow.

While media outlets must provide vigorous reportage regarding youth violence, they often ride a merry-go-round of stories, which reinforce stale plots and sometimes overlook trends which might help draft a more compelling and comprehensive narrative.

This is not to deny the positive coverage of various youth events. But good journalism goes beyond the events of the day -- be they school stabbings or awards ceremonies -- to unearth broader insights.

There is a trend regarding our young people into which the media may want to provide greater insight. It is the expansion of community service programmes among the nation’s youth.

These programmes are taking place in public and private schools, in civic and church groups, and among some young people offered alternative sentences by the courts.

Many used to think that community service was punishment for bad behaviour. Now more of us are seeing it as an opportunity for good citizenship.

Such service tends to go unnoticed, even though it is having a growing social impact by raising the consciousness of those volunteering and those grateful for the generosity of thousands of young Bahamians.

But a bigger story that we – and the media – have yet to catch on to is the even greater potential of community service programmes to transform more dramatically our nation’s youth and our country.

Most of these school-based service programmes, while well-intentioned, are not as well conceptualized or as organized as they can be.

For example, too many of our schools are substituting uninspiring campus-based busy work, for more genuine and dynamic community outreach beyond their campus borders, such as environmental stewardship activities.

We have not sufficiently integrated community service programmes with civics and character development initiatives. We have not sufficiently designed such programmes to make an increasingly self-absorbed generation more community-minded.

We are also failing to link service to learning, that is providing an academic or reflection component through which students can better make the connection between their service and larger national issues and concerns.

Perhaps an enterprising reporter may want to produce a series on community service by our youth: the successes, the problems and the possibilities. This would make for good investigative journalism – and good reading.

It may help provide a nonviolent alternative to many of our young men, yearning for the respect, belonging and purpose they often feel they can only seize through anger, violence and various forms of nihilism.

Lasting heroism helps to build a nation, rather than destroy a society. That goes as much for our young people as it does for us adults who have to help to change this terrifying math.

Comments

[The Watchers]

We are planning a website similar to
Chicago Crime Data (http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/) and Brazillian Body Count (http://www.pebodycount.com.br)

If you or anyone you know would like to help out, please email us.

We'd like to start with memorial pages of all the people murdered this year and last, statistics and identities of how many people accused of murder are currently out on bail, and depending on if we can get google maps to do what we need it to do we're also going to try to pinpoint where people were murdered.

In need of people to do data entry, contact the family of the deceased, and get recent, accurate statistics from the police/prison/etc...

At the moment on 2 web designers/programmers have volunteered, we need a graphic designer and another programmer with javascript, sql, google maps api, and wordpress experience.