Johnny came to visit me on Sunday.
“Washie, ah hear they pickin up money.”
“Money? For what?” I asked.
“For the officer who kill the fellow Thursday night.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I said, voicing my skepticism that the applause for the young policeman reached the extent of collecting money for him.
“If is true I goin give them a twenty dollars; for that policeman was brave to face this young criminal and get the better of him.
I nodded grudgingly to my friend Johnny for in spite of myself, I leaned towards his sentiments.
Johnny reinforced his position. “If the young officer did not shoot first, he mighta get shot, you know, and we woulda get another Frigate Bay case on we hand. The fella had a gun, you know.”
I nodded again.
“A mask too, a black mask. He leave home Thursday night with the intention to go on bad. I can’t guess what else he woulda do after he get the cell phone from the girl.”
“He sound like a real bad man for real,” I agreed with Johnny.
“Washie, how these man get so bad aready? They young, he was only twenty-something.”
“Twenty-seven,” I explained. “And he has been in trouble with the law since before 2003 that means since he was a teenager.
“I hear he was running away from the police and jump out of a plane. This is a real bad man, jumping out a plane? He must be Captain Marvel. You remember them comics we used to read?”
“He had held up a woman in her house at 2:30 in the morning. He had a knife. He escaped arrest and went to Nevis. When he thought things had cooled down he booked a flight. The aircraft stopped as it was taxying down the runway and, thinking that it was the police who had stopped the plane, he opened the door and jumped.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Johnny, “When you buss off a man like that you really cleaning up the city. Washie, how them man does get so bad so quick. Just the other day he was a child goin school. Where he start getting bad? In pre-school, in primary school or in high school?”
My answer to Johnny was: “He started getting bad at home. That’s where he was shaped, under his mother’s care. All the time he spent in all those schools, he was still under his mother’s influence. Believe it or not.”
“I agree with you. No matter what the school do, all the schools in the world can’t overcome the bad training from home. So what we goin do Washie? For is a lot a them like that you know, and we can’t just kill alla them. It will look bad in the eyes of the world.”
“I’m sure he used to give a whole heap of trouble in school; would not attend classes, would not pay attention, wouldn’t behave, wouldn’t learn. I’m sure he was in a low stream and left school before he reached the fifth form.”
“How you could be so sure?”
“Because these are the ones who show all the neglect by their parents. The parents do not monitor their school work; they do not make them behave.”
“You right, you know, when they buss the first bad wud they have a big laugh at it. When they wuk the first trick, is ah big joke.”
“All this time the child is developing on the wrong line and his mother hardly notices or does not realize that this is an indication that the child is on the .wrong track.”
“Well,” mused Johnny, pulling at his chin, “something gotta be wrong with the parents them.”
“The parent of such youth is usually a single mother who became sexually active in her teen years and produced a child by chance, an unwanted child whom the father, if known, refuses to support, usually claiming that the child is not his. If you think I am exaggerating, check out the known young criminals and the known young prostitutes and you will find that 90 percent of them belong to single mothers.”
“But children from married homes does turn out bad too.”
“That is also true, that’s the other 10 percent. These are the children whose parents over-indulged them since they were very young. They grew up without discipline. Everything they see they want and everything they want they get. Their parents are overseen in them and let them do as they like from the earliest childhood. They are not allowed to earn anything; they take everything for granted. When they reach teenage, that’s the time their parents realize that they are selfish, unmannerly and unruly.
“Their parents look on desolately as these offspring flout all the values on which they were raised. Fortunately for our society these cases are only a minority in our society.”
“A serious minority,” added Johnny. “You hear bout the young girl with them three young man on the internet? What you think about that?”
“This case supports my contention. Now this girl is obviously a prostitute in the making. Check her school records and I bet my last dollar she was not attending to her lessons and not behaving herself in class.
“But that is not all. Suppose she gets pregnant, which one of those men will take the child? You see the scenario? She is fifteen and is performing like a hard core prostitute. She gets pregnant sooner or later. No father takes the child. How do you think she will raise that child? That child is handicapped from birth. It is ninety-five percent certain that child will become a delinquent juvenile.”
“But Washie, some single mothers raise good children.”
“That is true, for childbearing brings some to their senses and they develop a love for their child and a sense of responsibility. But how many? Look at how the average teenage girl behaves today and tell me how many of them will become good responsible single mothers.”
“You make the thing sound so hopeless. The boys bad, the girls bad. You mean we dead?”
“Unless we change the course on which our society is heading, yes, we are doomed. Crime will increase, prostitution will become rampant and our society will become so coarsened that it wont be a suitable place for decent people.”
“You think we could change course?”
“Yes, but it call for pretty drastic measures. Some people might call them draconian measures.”
“How?”
“It has to start in the schools.”
“Schools? I thought you blaming the home life of the children.”
“The fault is in the homes, the solution is in the schools”
“Oh Ok, so how the school goin change things?”
“First, the schools will have to upgrade their roles to twenty four-seven. They will have to become boarding facilities where the youth will live through their formative years.”
“Washie you crazy!”
“First it will start by making it mandatory for all primary school children of single mothers of less than a certain income range to live in a facility run by the school.”
“Co-ed facilities?” Johnny voiced his anxiety.
“No! that would be a serious mistake. A recipe for trouble. It would defeat the purpose for which it is being run: to keep children out of temptation and out of trouble.
Johnny had to go so I promised I would tell him more about this concept, next time we meet.
