Ronald Thwaites | Life is cheap

Human life is cheap in Jamaica. Until recently more than a thousand like us would be murdered each year and hundreds more recklessly mangled on our roads through our own or someone else’s carelessness.

So far this year the police have “unalived” or “neutered” more than two hundred souls with scores more to come. The State sanctions or turns a blind eye to these killings. Listen to the top officials of the government and police.

CAMERAS?

Public credulity is stretched to believe that every single instance was self-defence. Tacitly we feel that each casualty is getting his deserved reward. The spurious correlation between the reduction of crime and police assassinations is encouraged. Troubled by the numbers, we lazily believe that body-worn cameras will assuage our short-lived disquiet. They are necessary but will be manipulated. Much deeper things are needed to stop that scourge.

Lots of court cases have been cleared up by the improving but still crawling justice system but justice or injustice, for most of us has shifted from courthouse to any street corner or yard where life is disrespected and where a gun-slinger, gangster or uniformed official, arrogates the power of God to take human life.

And nothing is likely to come of it. In fact, for many of us, the execution of another is considered no more than a messy but necessary triumph. We premise our safety on the killing of others. INDECOM and the likes of Jamaicans for Justice run the risk of becoming face-cards.

MURDERING MURDER

Charlie Kirk was very clear about this. For him more armed Americans would be the insurance policy of freedom. Due process is a nuisance. Trump says he’s not sure everybody is entitled to it. We have come to that conclusion already. Courthouses are effete relics of ersatz liberalism. Magna Carta was a long time ago. Unless you have money and links, our Charter of Rights is often a dead-letter. Check the States of Emergency, to the cessation of which official killings are a response.

Politicians, billionaires, cardinals and millions of the vulnerable poor have cleaved to our leaders’ reasoning. A whole heap of Jamaicans may not say it, but they believe the same. The State winks. “They (any blood-soaked corpse of your choice) don’t deserve to live”. Mentally-ill people are dead-men walking. ML King, George Floyd, Ketanji Brown-Jackson and the hundreds of nameless Jamaican victims from 1865 to 2025 are “scumbags” to borrow Kirk’s well-worn description. It’s more than the absence of empathy, as highly respected Dr Michael Abrahams wrote, it is a profound disrespect for life, equal to the worst slave masters. Mental slavery in our DNA, elevated, as so much else in our value system, to pass as practical necessity.

Taking human life wilfully other than in extreme and imminent defence of self or others is tragedy and sin, answerable before God. If not in this world, then certainly when we stand before the Judgment Seat. Life is cheap in Jamaica and the ultimate national self-delusion is to believe that we can murder murder.

IN CONTRAST

By contrast, last week Most Hon Errald Miller, a reserved gentleman, spoke of reverence for life even when diminished by dementia. Here is a person with many options for himself and Portia who commits his life and the supreme gift of his love for the single cause of protecting her dignity. He cares her not because she was prime minister but because he loves her and cherishes human life from its conception until its natural death.

Charlie Kirk’s death, like millions here and around the world is an attack on the sanctity of life. Many in Jamaica deny that all life is valuable – until of course we or our kin are in somebody’s cross-hairs.

Errald’s standard must be the standard for all of us – in every instance. And before you start, no one is suggesting that stern interdiction is not required to arrest , convict and punish criminals. But taking life is beyond that. Done by whomever and worse by those who claim agency from us all, it “unalives, neuters” the irrevocable gift of God.

That is why the letter “Growth without Values is Fragile” by Fr. Donald Chambers in this space last week rings true. In the pre-and post-election period we have been regaled with promises of things to be done by government with our money. But will these material projects make us life-respecting, happy and productive? How to achieve these virtues are what we are not hearing from Pharaoh and the newly-anointed Prince Pharaohs. We need leadership to commit to consensus and lead us to agree to how we must treat one another if growth is not accompanied by more cruelty and inequality and so rendered fragile and puny. If not, we end up all wounded and spiritually dead.

ENCOURAGING DISRESPECT

We teach our young people to be disrespectful of themselves and each other and then imprison or kill them when they behave what they have been taught. Come with me to any but a few of our schools and observe the time wasted in keeping order, the contempt for rules and the pervasive underlying assertion that doing what you feel like is the essence of freedom.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, foundational thinker of much of western civilization, had this to say in his Nicomachean Ethics:

“It is by training the habits that legislators make the citizens good. This is the object which all legislators must have at heart; if a legislator does not succeed at it, he fails at his purpose, and it constitutes the difference between a good polity and a bad one…”

“Thus in one word, states arise out of activities. That is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind…. It makes no small difference then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather ALL the difference”.

Taking a life, exploiting someone is the ultimate self-disrespect. Isn’t that slavery was all about? The only reason slave masters did not kill more slaves was because it would cost them to replace. Nowadays we have no such constraint. Cheapen life and your turn and the debilitation of society will inevitably follow.

Time come to choose life!

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com