The unacceptable cult of death

Celebrating pre-teen death is abominable

I cannot abide it anymore, what were children doing in a church afternoon yesterday when they should have been in school going about building a life on sound education?

It is becoming the norm and I fervently pray it is not; we have begun to celebrate lives of children, children cut down on the crest of puberty by seemingly other children who have moved on from water pistols and video games to real guns.

It is both an anomaly and abomination that we have a society where the killing of children has not created the utmost outrage that every right thinking person should find it untenable that this unspeakable evil finds place amongst us.

I am most affected by this in that if I did follow the parallel universe of parenthood, many of these kids would have my kids as older siblings; you do not have to be a parent to empathise because the death of those younger than ourselves exposes a vulnerability that we all possess, the possibility of death by unintended means.

A developing cult of death

It is a further damnation of our society that such crimes take place and no one can come forward with information to rid our societies of the cancer that is becoming violently malignant.

Instead, we find succour in tributes paid to the dead, the celebration of lives cut short unnaturally, flowers laid at pathways, fields, doors and gateways, candles lit to burn up in hours and soppy lullabies that give us the pretence and ill-comfort that all would be well.

It is becoming an accepted rite of demise, the cult of death awash with emotions difficult to articulate, we now spontaneously clap for the dead as we desperately try to eke out minuscule joy from such palpable sadness.

Is there value in life?

I cannot find stronger words to castigate the societal comfort that allows parents to bury their children who have come upon death by what is essentially a social malaise that politicians are completely hapless in addressing, the police are lacking intuition in getting a resolution and the streets are paralysed with irrational fear when they should be performing their honourable and civic duties of reporting what they have witnessed.

How is it that the value of life is so deprecated to that of shoot-em-up games only that this time the person shot does not get up and walk away?

How is it that the murder of a fellow human-being does not excite the most self-hating revulsion and guilt in the perpetrators?

Speak up or be damned

In the end, I have a word for those who having witnessed these heinous allow the perpetrators to walk free to commit even more heinous crimes.

The likelihood is these perpetrators were bullies in school halls and playgrounds, but no one told on them because they did not want to “snitch” and become outcasts amongst their peers. There is no honour amongst thieves, there is no dignity in condoning injustices, there is no pride in the silence that allows impunity to thrive and there is no respect for life if unwarranted cruelty is unreported.

These selfsame perpetrators continually get away with bullying, first with their brutishness and as they mature they take on other tools to menace others, baseball bats, knives and contemporaneously guns, they have probably put others in hospital and boasted about their menace to other despicable low-lives.

Whilst the law may not be able to prove the culpability or the reluctant conspiracy of the witnesses who have willingly given their tongues to the gross evil of silence, there must be a conscience in all of us at work that should and must link us with further crimes committed by these evil people – children they might be – because when the seedlings of malevolence were budding as bullying and menace we did not do our parts by intimating the authorities then.

Speak NOW!

Even now, all is not lost in getting information out to a counsellor, the police, a community leader, your parents, trusted friends or even the police, no matter how long ago, it is our duty to speak up and rid our streets of villains that blacken our paths with the blood of the innocent, most especially, if you have been a victim of bodily harm from any of these rotten people.

I think we should have enough of flowers being placed at memorials when they should be presented as bouquets of affection to loved ones, I do not want to switch my television on to witness another group of pre-teens burying their friend who was gunned down on the street and yet, the killer is still at large. It beggars belief that what is becoming of our society.

Speaking as the Book

One final supplication would be that the killers of Rhys Jones would not find peace, succour or refuge, but like Cain, the first recorded murderer, they shall be fugitives in life and vagabonds all their days; their lives would be marked with sadness deeper than that which they have caused till the blood of the innocent child is fully avenged.

Believe it or not, the blood of the innocent still cries out from the ground against those who have unjustly shed blood and those who have allowed this to happen also have blood on their hands.

Beyond planting a suicide in the headlines

Mere mortals at NASA too

Hardly 100 hours had passed since the horror of Virginia Tech when a seriously troubled young man first gunned down two people in a dormitory, then posted a multimedia package of his thoughts to NBC and returned to snuff out another 30 including himself; another saga was playing out at NASA.

A man who had been a NASA contractor for 12 years took two people hostage and ended up kill both himself and one of the hostages. He had a bad job review, but is that all there is to it?

In the passed few months it would appear there is an underbelly of troubled NASA personnel who till recently had probably been sent to the NASA sanatorium but are some are now escaping detection and playing out their desperately flawed humanity for all to see.

There would be inquiries as to how security was breeched in a premier Ministry of Defence location, what psychological frame of mind the man was in, what triggered it and how to avoid such embarrassing shows of instability.

The fear of dying unsung

However, there is a deeper issue to be reviewed here which is now beyond the right to bear death (arms), this is the way fragile people with a grievance now seem to assuage their troubles with a suicide mission and a suicide.

Suicides occur everyday, but are seriously under-reported and they never allow for a decent professional analysis of why it happened as the fear of dying unsung and uncelebrated clouds the mind of the person. So, it has been become a standard activity in America for suicides to include innocent people in their demise as if to properly highlight why they killed themselves.

Whether that gets adequate airing as others grieve for their lost loved ones and recriminations fly as blame is apportioned all around is left to be seen. But a good study of why and the social underpinnings of what lead to the outrage and carnage has to be objectively taken to be able to see the early signs of a disintegrating human before they take out themselves and innocent bystanders.

David in Thoughts of a Naija man begins an analysis of what could have lead to the massacre at Virginia Tech.

References

Inside Cho's head

The right to bear death

The right they should lose

Obviously, the gun lobby in America would be wondering if a backlash would occur on the validity of the 2^nd Amendment and the right to bear arms.

What one can say in the light of the great tragedy that has befallen America with the worst mass shooting ever and that on a university, one of many shootings that happen in schools as an American way of life is that something feeds this rage and guns are easily available.

I reiterate that the right to bear arms should and must only be for legally sanctioned law enforcement and organised armed forces for the defence of the realm - America is no more the Wild West, it is time to put away the primitive instinct to point and shoot at the slightest provocation.

For the 32 that have died, it is a tragedy so great and my prayers are with their families, loved ones and friends - if America would have some soul-searching and go out to deal with the real problem is another issue all together.

Today, we grieve in sorrow and pray for succour.

London police in an institutionally culpable homicide

Crime headlines as I left

I leave London saddened and hardly elated by news that arrived on the Evening Standard paper.

You will recall that last week I noticed within a 5-minute walk, signs seeking information about grievous crimes that created a sense of insecurity about the city from the first night.

So, I left, I got a copy of the Evening Standard and the front page read, “Father is killed by teenage gun gang”. One could almost dismiss this as a typical drug dispute situation, but the detail reveals a deeper malaise in society that I am not sure is easy to address.

Standing up to be killed?

The father killed was a 22-year-old young man father of a 3-year old son and he got killed doing what we as a society has lost sight of and stopped doing – standing up to anti-social miscreants who menace our peace, property and lives.

Hardly 7 months before, a group of kids were throwing stones at his car, he came of his house and confronted the gang; he got stabbed in the neck that the stabbing just missed his jugular vein.

A rotten police for a rotting society

The police took calls from his fiancée every day for 5 weeks and still did not end up taking a statement from her, and after the police were supplied with the details of the perpetrators and so on, but no one got prosecuted for the crime that the kids deemed themselves untouchable.

The question is how kids end up with knives that they can be such a danger to society having had parents whose dereliction of parental responsibility has lead to the creation of these treacherous monsters who because they are under 18 never see enough of the toughness of the law when they offend.

The news we now have is, this very young family was terrorised since then to the most recent situation where the young father who had returned home after a confrontation with that self-same gang stepped out and got shot by a member of that gang.

The next obvious question as we learn that a 14-year old who cannot be named is arrested is how did a kid end up with a loaded gun with which he has wasted away a life?

A rotten police and a rotten job

Now we hear that the police are sorry for the way the initial investigation was conducted, well, they cannot be half sorry; the life of a young family has been ruined because the terminal point where the crime-investigation-prosecution-punishment chain should have kicked in at the first crime was left unaddressed because of police inaction.

One cannot begin to imagine what might have been going through the minds of the police when the young lady tried to report the first crime – could Canning Town in East London have been such a hopeless crime-ridden place that no crime was worthy of police attention?

Have we become so obsessed with prospective terrorist attacks that more intimate crimes no more attract interest and service?

Could, as in the case of Steven Lawrence a policeman detective have been manipulating and thwarting the investigation in favour of the suspects such that they can get away scot-free?

Taking back our society

We cannot begin to talk of the kind of people who brought forth this brood of vipers who have become a scourge on our society, who from youth have no concept of the value of life or property and have become a law unto themselves.

Sorry, is just not enough, relieving some senior policemen of their duties cannot begin to assuage the pain of that loss, in fact, apart from the prosecution of those youths; there should after a review of all the investigations of the police into the first crime charges of negligence, dereliction of duty and probably culpable homicide in seeking to address this murder should ensue.

We need to win our society back from the situation where it has become the playground of reckless criminal abuse and non-consideration for others.

Once kids get onto the first rung of a seemingly criminal existence they should be brought under strict supervision which in some cases should include confinement as well as monitoring, mentoring and vocational training – there is no scope for a politically correct assessment of this problem – society cannot afford to paper over deep seated social problems.

The parents should not only be named and shamed for allowed discipline and control to fail in the upbringing of their wards; whilst no one goes to parental school for childrearing; it is no excuse for unleashing devils unto our streets.

Institutionally incapable police

The police having been labelled institutionally racist are also becoming institutionally lazy in dealing with serious crime, it is unlikely that one can retain confident in a leadership that allows such serious issues to become headlines because requisite action has not been taken as needed to resolve crimes.

Just as I read on African Shirts a few days ago, I do not think London with all its culture, attractions and beauty is not close by far to the safest city in Europe

The heightened perception of vulnerability to crime needs to be addressed better as the deluded Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police suggests we can leave our front doors unlocked because of lessened crime, we find that we can still get shot at our doorsteps which it could have been prevented if the earlier stabbing had been given full police attention.

References

Telegraph | News | Young father shot dead as he challenges teenage yobs

Teen questioned over gun killing

Police sorry for inquiry 'hurt'