Last Thursday, we learnt that two students of a city school had been charged and remanded into custody following the murder of a Govern-ment Technical Institute (GTI) student, Samuel Grannum, who reportedly died from injuries sustained during a confrontation between ‘rival gangs’ two Fridays ago.
Up to this time we know little more about the young man’s killing apart from the fact that it happened in broad daylight during what we were told was a skirmish between ‘rival gangs’. Given the time of day and the location of the incident it is reasonable to assume that the skirmish that led to the young man’s death – in the vicinity of the Route 42 Bus Park on Croal Street just after 1600 hours – would have been witnessed by onlookers, including grown-ups.
Not too many moons ago after-school schoolboy skirmishes on the streets would have been quickly dispersed by adults who happened to be in the vicinity and the young ‘tearaways’ might even have been taken to task on the following day by the schools’ authorities. Nor were there too many incidents in those days during which the protagonists were even seriously injured much beyond cuts and bruises, far less killed.
Things are different these days. Grown-ups have become sufficiently aware of what, all too frequently, are the violent nature of the contemporary confrontations to look the other way. They understand only too well that these days, you may well intervene at your peril.
The other perhaps more pertinent point that ought to be made about the murder of the young GTI student has to do with the clear as day evidence which the incident provides of a near complete loss of the restraints that were exercised by the protagonists of not too many years ago which would have meant that now deceased schoolboy would have, at worst, suffered a few bumps and bruises. We have left those days behind. Lethal weapons have become the order of the day, even, in some instances, among schoolboys.
In the instance of the confrontation that led to young Grannum’s death there is talk of the involvement therein of a young man who already has a murder ‘rap’ under his belt. Here, one must pause to inquire as to whether the skirmish that led to the killing of the schoolboy is not reflective of a bizarre crossover and beyond that an irretrievable loss of the kinds of social controls that used to repose in the domains of homes, the church and other community-based institutions where youngsters were tutored in certain kinds of restraints and where differences were settled using far less terminal options. Or do we not find ourselves confronted, increasingly, with a reality in which many of our juveniles have now come to see extreme violence as a mark of manhood?
So that the question to be asked here has to do with whether or not the multi-faceted tragedy of the deadly downtown juvenile skirmish that claimed young Grannum’s life is not a signal (not the first one, mind you) that the pursuit of ‘development’ as measured in what we get out of our oil and gas earnings cannot allow us to get so far ahead of ourselves that we lose track of those unwholesome social transformations that can turn our Guyana into a unwholesome ‘hell whole’ that will cancel out that which we perceive to be our oil wealth-related accomplishments?
If it may well be that the injuries that led to the death of a schoolboy following a violent high-day-time gang fight are not sufficient to send unmistakable signals that we are in the process of negotiating a ‘wrong turn,’ then we stand imperilled in ways that we are yet to understand.
Here, it is a matter of beginning to read the tea leaves in a hurry and to recognize, with due haste, where the fault lines are. Poverty, the loss of controls in our homes, communities and, it seems, in many schools along with irrefutable evidence of the incremental ineffectiveness of our law-and-order institutions and compelling distractions linked to a never-ending ‘hustle’ on the crowded lower rung of the social ladder to make ends meet are, increasingly, serving as compelling distractions from those other considerations in the absence of which we will remain a dysfunctional society, our oil wealth notwithstanding.
