Our futile war on crime in The Bahamas

Our futile war on crime
NOELLE NICOLLS
Tribune Staff Reporter
nnicolls@tribunemedia.net:



Now here is a bright idea: If Hubert Ingraham and Perry Christie would just work together, the whole country would be united against crime. Maybe that is what it will take to solve the problem. What a laughable thought, to say the least.

Honestly, if our present leaders mustered all of their intellectual capacities I am willing to bet any wager they would still be clueless and ineffective in abating crime. The math is simple. We will not solve crime by fighting crime. We will only solve crime by eliminating the conditions that give rise to crime.

So what if we stopped asking the government what their crime plan is and stop holding the police responsible for stopping crime. The problems we currently face are only allowed to thrive because there is an absence of community. Let us stop expending so much energy crying over crime, and focus on reclaiming and restoring community.

This may sound callous, but last year's murder count of 77 is dwarfed by all of the other social ills. Our fixation on the murder count - the endless comparison between annual figures - is pointless. The conditions in society are not static; they are deteriorating while our population is increasing, so naturally there will be an increase in crime. It has nothing to do with whether the Free National Movement or the Progressive Liberal Party is in power, or which Commissioner of Police the government installs.

Fact: A large percentage of our murders stem from interpersonal conflicts. This is an example of how our dysfunctional behaviour translates into a proliferation of crime. Look around at all of the incestuous relationships Bahamian fathers have with their children, or the number of children living in fear of being molested by their pastors or the shop owner down the street. In fact, look at an ordinary day in the House of Assembly. We have drifted so far away from the true spirit of community that our society has become a production house of criminality and dysfunction.

Most of the largest town criers are not even exposed to a real threat of violent crime, but in a state of fear created by the manipulation of a perception of crime, they are overcome with paranoia. The average middle class Bahamian in their mid-40s would probably struggle to name more than five incidents of violent crime that have directly impacted their lives (child abuse not withstanding). The fear they experience is more of an illusion.

Those that we should really be concerned about are the children in our society. The threat to them is real. Their lives are invariably shaped by the intense trauma that results from their exposure to violence and a host of other social ills.

On a regular basis I work with children from "Over the Hill"; they average about eight years old. In a weekly Monday exercise called "sharing the news", they tell stories about the people they know that got "jook up", "locked up", "beat up" or "killed". In this forum we often remind them that "the news" does not always have to be about the violence in their community. But without fail, every week they return with war stories. Imagine what their level of direct exposure will be by age 40.

What is most alarming is that the dysfunction they speak of has become so normalized within their neighbourhoods that they are incapable of realising how it is adversely shaping their perceptions of reality.

These children do not need a crime plan. They need a community, and what we have in the Bahamas, as Baba Shango rightly articulated, is a group of individuals stuck on the same rock. A true community is not a group of individuals living in a specific location, sharing a government and a common heritage.

A true community enables the healthy development of its children, helping them to discover their purpose and understand who they are. The community supports the healing of all children, nurtures their talents and welcomes their contributions.

In a holistic community, each generation is the link to the one that precedes it and the one that follows. A reciprocal relationship is fostered as they inspire each other. What we have today is a situation in which no one is being inspired. Few are pulling from the past and fewer still are giving to the future.

In a holistic community, the blessings bestowed on individuals in the form of skills, talents and personal wealth are no more the possession of individuals than the air they breathe. The whole notion of the self made person is an illusion. This thinking is what Albert Einstein calls "a kind of optical delusion of (one's) consciousness". It is the kind of delusion that negates community. No one survives or thrives without a form of community.

So much has been lost of our understanding of the world, our traditions, customs, rites of passage and initiations. At one time these served as a guide for the development and structuring of our communities. Often times we perceive our traditional ways as dead, perhaps that is the very reason our society is in a state of decay. Our present practices are materialistic, superficial and commercially oriented. They lack meaning and purpose.

For example, we have lost the essence of what it means to name a child. A name is supposed to call out the destiny of a child and remind a child of his or her purpose. It is not simply a form of identification. The popular practice of compounding the names of two parents to label a child is not rooted in an understanding of community. It is a glitch in the system derived from individualistic Western ideals.

The naming ceremony is a sacred event. It is where the community discovers the child's purpose and is made responsible for helping the child to fulfil his or her destiny. It is where the community unites to celebrate the arrival of the child, who is the bearer of news from the same realm to which the rest of the community must prepare to return one day.

In a holistic community, this is one of the many structures that provide a firm foundation for the growth and development of the child. In our society, many of these essential structures have been corrupted or outright abandoned.

Another prime example is the relationship between our children and our elders. The need for the connection between children and elders is much more fundamental than our current practices would suggest. A visit to grammy in our culture has become a nonchalant activity that we do in our spare time. We marginalize our elders, based on our Western world view. Generally, elders are viewed as economically unproductive, because they do not work in the economy, while they continually consume resources. They are considered dispensable, worthless even.

In traditional African culture, where a holistic understanding of community manifests, there is an unspoken language between children and elders. This is why elders take a great interest in the birth of a child. The elders prepare the children for the journey ahead, sharing with them the secrets of life. The children share with the elders news of the next realm, preparing them for their upcoming journey.

"Throughout children's lives in the village there is a strong message that they belong to a community of people who value them almost beyond anything else. It starts when grandparents participate in the birthing and are the first to hold the newborn. Because the newborn is considered a villager who has just arrived from a long trip that started in the land of the ancestors, the people most recognizable to them are the old ones," according to Malidoma Some, in the "Healing Wisdom of Africa".

If it is not clear as yet that we have far greater problems than crime then perhaps you are not seeing the crux of the matter. In our absence of community, we are inevitably damned, because we live by a destructive separatist agenda that is safeguarded by a belief in armed force.

In material terms this looks like a proliferation of gated communities, "shanty towns" and prisons; a flood of police on the streets; an increase in police raids, civilian armament and private security; and an increase in gangs. Surprise. Surprise. We are creating an increasingly segregated society with "strong people" who get by and "weak people" who don't.

All of this stems from our linear way of thinking. In this model everything is perceived through a dichotomous paradigm: good, bad; ally, enemy; old, young; black, white; male, female; straight, gay. In this two dimensional world view it is hard to see the inherent connections in all things. All reality is polarized; all knowledge is externalized, and if something cannot be proven with empirical evidence it does not exist. This lends to materialism and an imbalanced left-sided way of thinking, which cuts one off from the world of spirit.

Imagine our predicament when the entire education system is designed on this model. It breeds a society of highly materialistic, technocratic individuals with little self-knowledge. Our children are not taught to learn from within and they develop a sense of dependency. Ultimately, western education suppresses our children's intuition and causes it to atrophy.

Our linear way of thinking has manifested in everything around us, from our thoughts on life and death, to the way we design our so-called communities.

Often we hear people use the following phrases: "Here today, gone tomorrow", or "I only have one life to live." These are symbolic of our thoughts on life and death. The Christian view suggests a person is born, dies, and goes to heaven or hell. An atheist's view suggests a person is born and dies. In essence, it is the same linear model of thinking that gives rise to both of these world views. This is in complete opposition to what we see in nature.

I n traditional African culture the person is born into the community to serve a specific function or role. They leave the community through the doorway of death, enter the ancestral realm, where they continue to play a supportive role, and then are reborn into the community. Africans have developed this understanding by observing nature: the cycle of the seasons, the cycle of the moon, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the cyclical transfer of energy in the ecosystem.

In Bahamian society we recognize the cyclical nature of certain things in our speech, primarily in an unconscious way. When we say, "you killing ya granddaddy", or when we remark that a child has inherited a particular skill or trait from a deceased relative, these are unconscious revelations of reality. Unfortunately for us, living unconsciously, without purpose, has disconnected us from our very nature. This is why we are so destructive to ourselves and the external environment.

Our linear way of thinking has even manifested in the way we construct our neighbourhoods. Examine any modern neighbourhood and you will notice that our houses are lined up on streets. What you are actually seeing are houses arranged in parallel lines that never meet. This is further compounded by the walls and fences we erect to delineate boundaries and create division. This is a tangible example of a segregative way of being: each unit is compartmentalized and excluded from the other.

In a holistic model, communities are designed based on a unified way of being. The cosmological principle of community creates a physical blueprint for designing our dwellings, reminding us daily of who we are. For example, the dwellings in a compound are generally arranged in concentric circles. Elders and children are located at the core. Women form the inner perimeter and men form the outer circle.

Children

This ties back into the relationship between children and elders, and the role of everyone in the community. The African model shows us that at the heart of community is wisdom, ancestral knowledge represented by the seed and the ripening fruit. The women represent the nurturing force that supports the core. The men represent the external boundary, the hard exterior that protects that which is most important.

Unfortunately, based on our current level of consciousness, it is virtually impossible for us to create a true community. Individually and collectively, we do not identify with the requisite higher levels of consciousness in our being needed to develop community.

Consciousness is the underlying essence that flows through nature. It is our ability to understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in; it is our awareness of the connectivity of all things.

When consciousness is directed in a linear way it manifests in the identification with the material aspects of our being. When it is focused in a balance manner, in both hemispheres of our brain, it manifests in a holistic way of being. When we operate on a higher plane of consciousness we have greater wisdom and foresight; we access our ability to see through the third eye.

"No problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it," as my mother often says in quoting Albert Einstein. This type of thinking is consistent with the old adage, "A man cannot be above his mind." Basically, a person with pink glasses lives in a pink world.

If we raise the level of consciousness in our people, particularly in our children, then new ways of being will emerge. If every strategy we employed to solve our social problems was infused with this inner knowledge, the essence of who we are, it would transform the way we live. Because everything occurring internally manifests externally, higher consciousness would inevitably give birth to community.

If we really want to solve the problem of crime we have to fill the void created by a lack of community. Raising our consciousness as a people is our best hope for reclaiming and restoring community.

The power to arrest the problem is in the hands of each individual, but most relinquish their power by denying individual responsibility. The next time you look outside of yourself for the answer to the crime problem, ask yourself these questions: What is my state of consciousness, and what am I doing to build a true community?

But first, we must examine, are we really interested in forming a community with the other people stuck on this rock, or are we content with Western illusions of security, prosperity, Godliness, and identity.

I suspect our greatest problem is the fact that we are not truly interested in forming a community. Rather, we are satisfied with living a life based on the illusions that we construct, chief among them is our futile war on crime.

May 31, 2010

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