'Dogheartedness' in civic life

Desmond Henry

TREASURE BEACH:

THE JUDGE in the US court threw the book at the young man, in much the same way that he had previously thrown the dog to its brutal death. It was court rage upstaging road rage. Andrew Burnett's inexcusable intemperateness had met its match, and off he was sent to jail for three years.

Many papers in the US last week gave prominent coverage to the trial - and penalty - of the 27-year-old telephone repairman from Norfolk, Virginia, who was arrested, tried and convicted on one of the most heinous modern-day crimes of cruelty to an animal.

According to reports, Burnett was driving his SUV out in California when he tried to cut off another driver (a woman) in her lane. In the process the woman driver inadvertently tapped his back bumper and they both stopped to inspect the damage. But it turned out to be much more than that. Burnett got into such a hysterical rage with the road angel, that in one fell swoop he leaped yelling from his vehicle, grabbed her diminutive poodle that was riding with her and threw it straight into the lanes of oncoming traffic. It was run over immediately and crushed to death. Burnett fled the scene.

News of the event so angered citizens across the US that reports of Burnett and his cruelty spread like wild fire across all media and over the Internet. Humane societies across the country immediately pledged $120,000 to help track and apprehend him. Before long he was traced, found and arrested. At the trial, jurors, according to the reports, deliberated only 40 minutes before returning a guilty verdict. He did not take the stand.

The judge was in no mood to play 'ease-up'. He gave Burnett the maximum three years in prison. He justified the stiff sentence by saying, in part, that Burnett could just as easily harm a human in much the same way in the future. "It's a case of rage-induced violence", the judge was reported as saying. "I believe that prison can send a message and that it can deter".

Well, three cheers to that magistrate. Perhaps we could try to engage his state of mind on one of our morning talk shows on how he relates cruelty to animals to an overall state of cruelty in civic life. I'd love to hear his views. Or perhaps we might send him some statistics, along with pictures, of just how low we regard both animal and human lives in Jamaica. It just possibly might begin to shame us out of our casual par-for-the-course attitude towards open carnage on our highways, and casual savagery in our ghettos.

The fact that we blithely tolerate the open rotting of dead animals on our highways with nary a concern for the message it sends about our overall civic quality, suggests to me that had Burnett done the same thing in Jamaica, he could well be in line for donship. He would be demonstrating heroic qualities.

"Do unto others, before they do unto you" appears to be becoming the first principle of social conduct in our modern Jamaican culture. It is part and parcel of the law of the muscular approach to problem-solving. Forget mental, intellectual or convivial - these take too much time. It is much easier to use muscle - raw, brutish, vulgar muscle. There is an indescribable new roughness in the ways we treat dog and man in this country. And we are getting deeper and deeper into its practice.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, and a pleasant help in trouble.

Desmond Henry is a marketing strategist based at Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.

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