A MOTHER returns from church to the gruesome discovery that her three children ages three, 13 and 15 have been brutally killed, stab wounds all over their bodies, their throats cut. Thus, in St. Mary, another layer of barbarism has been added to murder Jamaican style.
This fearsome episode follows closely on another killing in Falmouth in which a father and his three-year-old daughter were shot to death in a revenge killing as two gangs fight over turf.
When innocent children are killed, it is almost impossible to conceive any cause that could properly be called a motive. In the case of the St. Mary slaughter, we are forced to fall back on insanity as an explanation.
And we are left with the frightening possibility that some form of madness is propelling Jamaica's overall murder rate which now must be among the highest in the world.
The concept of a mental state comparable to insanity taking over rational behaviour in a society is not as far-fetched as it may seem. The world recently marked the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where, during World War II, over one million Jews were killed, mostly women and children, starved to death or sent to the gas chambers as part of Hitler's 'final solution'. Children are routinely slain in parts of Africa and there seems to be no limit to man's inhumanity to man.
Insensitivity to the killing of an individual seems to gather momentum and soon becomes insensitivity to mass killing. Murder begins to feed on itself, becoming increasingly a reflex action. It now seems clear that a rising number of innocent children are being murdered in Jamaica as part of the general slaughter, further evidence of a moral sickness spreading through the body politic like a fatal fever.
This kind of primal savagery can hardly be pre-empted by police patrols or security personnel armed with sophisticated weaponry.
And so to satisfy the need for justice and for the immediate family and community to get some form of emotional release, no effort must be spared in seeing that the killer is arrested and tried and appropriate punishment administered as quickly as the law allows.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
