The Tribune

THIS came to mind as I sat and witnessed the outpouring of sympathy when someone got murdered the other day.

The grief is real, the fear is even more real and at the bottom of it, we are all losing.

As men and boys kill each other, we are all suffering the whiplash from the drive-by shootings, the armed home invasions, the gunshots that go off at night, the fact that no sirens sound when the shots fill the night skies in Palmdale.

The cacophony of different types of gunshots regale us at 4am on a weekend and 3am on a weekday. Yet there are no sirens that go along with them. It’s as if they say, oh, they only the poor people chiren killing ‘theysef’. What other answer could there be? Perhaps they were not gunshots, perhaps they were only in the dream space. But the damage done is real. It’s almost as if Kemp Road, Nassau Village and Fox Hill are no go areas, except when the body is well and truly dead and the police must go in post-mortem and ‘investigate’.

Is this what happens to poor people’s children?

The line at the morgue is long, or it appears to be long as crowds gather to get to see the dead. Sadly, the process is inhuman. It takes weeks often to even get the bodies.

No funeral services can be arranged or they have to be delayed because there’s no body to bury.

Poor people’s children don’t deserve to be mourned, apparently. Sadly, poor people’s children are the ones who are being killed.

Yes, they may be killing each other, shooting one another, but they are still children of someone. Someone’s son died last night.

Someone’s son died this morning. Yet we mourn not their death. Poor people’s children are black; black is apparently not a good thing. Blackness is equated with poverty. Poor people’s children are poor, well that’s why they are poor people’s children. Poor people’s children are not smart, they don’t deserve to get a good education; they provide chattel for the rich man’s workforce.

We blame poor people’s children for everything. They are violent. They are criminals. Poor people’s children are excluded from most possibilities to success, not because they are less intelligent or violent from birth. Have we ever stopped to look at the environment poor people’s children grow up in?

The line in Buju Banton’s song, “Circumstances make me who I am”, speaks loudly about the violence they are exposed to. The peer pressure they live with is not about doing well at school; it’s more about how to succeed as the underdog; it’s about seeing crime and drugs around them all day. Their role models in their neighbourhoods are often gang leaders, drug dealers, gamblers, brothel owners and sundry businessmen and women who may not have had the benefit of a college degree, in fact, they were mostly barred from that because they were poor people’s children.

We often say that a group of violent black males are causing the country to implode. “Whya re they violent?” Poverty causes all kinds of things. There ain’t a lot of love because people are working too hard. “Theya re care-worn” and calloused from scrubbing and toiling. Nowadays, this idea of poverty has left the Bahamas and the poor people’s children see that they must have all the bling and glamour of the rappers. They are encouraged in their consumerism by the idea that the world owes them something. They are, though, still human. We treat them as if they were not human, however. We treat them as if they did not have the same rights as other people’s children.

What are the chances that someone coming from Step Street will succeed as a lawyer in our current environment that excludes many of them from a decent education.

Yes, it sends them to school but why do so many leave unable to read or write? What options do they have after that?

I looked around the other day after the young boy got shot on Step Street and wondered how else could he have survived if not to die in retaliation shooting.

All he saw around him was gang violence and drugs, crime and materialism. School is not valued. Who has money for that?

We spend our lives trying to make more money only to die in the process.

After that boy died, the wheels that had already been set in motion so that he would be killed, fall victim to senseless violence to us, but obviously violence that means something to them. Poor people’s children are not seen as a productive part of the economy. That’s what they have access to and we do not give them any options because many of us see poor people’s children as broken and not worth fixing.

We need to step back and begin to ask what are we saying about poor people’s children. We have condemned them before they are even born simply because they are poor people’s children. That is especially true for the young men who see no other way to live than to be bad boys and live large while they have the chance.

We live in a world that says poor people’s children do not need to be mourned because they are poor. They are less than human. They are not welcome in places where other people go. When they go to mourn their fallen brothers they are shot in a drive-by shooting.

Yet another poor person’s son died this morning and there was no outpouring of grief, even though he was some woman’s son.

That woman has lost all her boys to the streets, what did she do wrong? How do we change the life of poor people’s children?

• If you have comments or questions, please e-mail iabethellbennett@yahoo.co.uk.