Kristen Gyles | Getting back at the revenge culture

One of the saddest occurrences of 2021 was the brutal and unjust murder of Levi Chambers. The victim of an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, he was stabbed to death by an angry mob in St Thomas. In the mob’s impassioned zeal to find Davion Bryan, a suspected child abductor who was, and still is, on the run, they assumed Mr Chambers was the wanted man; they chased him down and murdered him.

The fact is, if it were the alleged child abductor the mob had caught, he would now be dead, and perhaps no one would even know whether he was in fact the culprit. We would also not know what the motive was behind the abductions, if he was in fact guilty. That’s how revenge tends to work – quite mindlessly, in some cases. Nothing has come out of Mr Chamber’s unlawful and unjust murder, and I won’t hold my breath waiting. After all, it would not be the first time people would have taken the law into their own hands and made a total mess of it, knowing they will likely not be held to account.

RE-EVALUATE

My message and plea here is for us to re-evaluate the way we view life. Life should not be seen as a privilege which man reserves the right to snatch from the naughty and give to the nice, since humanity cannot, and has never been able to, create life. This is one of the many things that distinguish us from our Creator. And although throughout the history of the world, we have proven our finiteness, I think sometimes we try our best to convince ourselves that we are in complete control.

While humanity has made many amazing discoveries throughout the ages, our many advancements dazzle the eyes at one moment and at another, they all fall flat at the onset of some supernatural or simply unforeseen disaster. This should demonstrate that man is just not that big.

A significant part of why revenge plays such a prominent role in our society, is how big we desperately want to feel. We all want to feel that we are bigger than being violated, and so it’s hard for us to accept the notion that life is not our creation, and not ours to destroy at will.

I genuinely don’t believe Jamaicans as a whole truly value life. And the problem is worsening. Our murder rate is reaching through the roof, and the culprits are not just routine killers, but sometimes ordinary people who have fallen prey to the vicious mindset of violent revenge.

This mindset, like a plague, has spread far and wide and has injured the minds of people virtually everywhere. President Donald Trump, for example, in announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gloated that he “died like a dog” and that he “died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering, screaming and crying all the way”. Baghdadi was the cold-hearted terrorist leader of ISIS. He was responsible for the death of countless innocent people. Trump rightly declared that, thanks to the US troops, Baghdadi will never again hurt any innocent man, woman or child. That is something to be happy about. And yet, I still don’t know how I feel about hearing President Trump rejoice over Baghdadi’s whimpering and screaming and dying like a dog.

After all, did his whimpering or screaming help anyone anywhere? Likely not. But for some strange reason, him dying a normal death wouldn’t have been good enough to satisfy our deranged pleasures – at least, not those of the president.

CRIPPLING DISEASE

Revenge can be a crippling disease. It can turn the sane-headed into maniacs, and it has. The film Law Abiding Citizen outlines the plot of a (typically) law-abiding man who becomes almost psychopathic, doing everything in his power to mercilessly mete out revenge to the murderers of his wife and daughter. The film demonstrates how maniacal we can become in trying to make others suffer, when it is felt that justice has not been served.

I suppose Senator Lambert Brown had watched this film late at night before he commented that he would walk proudly to ‘the William’ after taking the law into his own hands if any of his female family members were harmed, in the absence of the rule of law.

As human beings, we will always want to be certain that justice is meted out. In fact, a significant proportion of the very same murders we bemoan are reprisal killings. That is, cases in which people are killed supposedly for violating someone else. The said violation may range from an accidental stepping on the wrong person’s clean Clarks to a brazen daylight murder in the wrong community. Either way, the revenge culture has costed us much. It has costed us many lives, and, beyond that, it has costed us peace of mind. It’s time we squeeze the life out of it once and for all.

I won’t pretend as though the sun going down on December 31 and coming up again on January 1 will suddenly mean the fanciful wishes for the new year – of a reliable and corruption-free justice system – will suddenly come true, but I do hope that while we continue to wait, we will remember not to become villains ourselves. Let’s endeavour to keep our hearts and minds clean from the revengeful spirit that has been tearing our country apart.

Kristen Gyles is a graduate student at The University of the West Indies, Mona. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.