Mothers in Guyana, regardless of their race or political affiliations, grieved over the pictures of the slain babies in Lusignan with a mother’s heart. They grieved over the slain young UG graduate in Bartica and Corporal Zakeer with a mother’s heart. They have grieved over the years for the mothers of the victims of kidnappings and slayings and for the orphaned children;and today mothers continue to grieve with a mother’s heart for the young men slain while they are still no more than babies.

Evidence points to their ruthless maiming and killing of innocents.  But who are the real culprits?  Who are really responsible for these young lives having gone so badly astray that they have literally reached the point of no return?
Who pointed these impressionable children in the direction that they took?  Who impressed upon them that a gun instead of a pen or a hoe and a fork could take them out of a penurious life?  Who is really guilty for the blood of these children?

From time immemorial children have grown up in abject poverty without turning to crime.  West Indian fathers have a track record of spawning numerous offspring like animals and then abandoning them; and mothers have always, with a rare exception, arrogated to themselves the mantle of total parenthood.  I know of children who honour their mothers on both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, because their moms undertook both roles, and most often the elder siblings have helped in the care of the younger ones.

However, the church and the entire community always took an active role in supervising and caring for children abandoned by fathers while mothers worked.  Formerly, no child could have gone astray in any community without the elders collectively chastising him/her until they returned to the straight and narrow path.

What happened to the elders of the respective communities that they could not, as a collective, guide these children into the light?  How could anyone not recognise that these young men were going astray when they first began to act in ways inimical to their own interests and the interests of the wider society? Even the notorious Rondel (Fineman) Rawlins was the young son of a loving mother, who lamented that she brought him up to respect the Lord.  What drove him in the direction where he became Guyana’s “Most Wanted” and was finally brought down by the gun by which he lived?”

Along with caches of arms and ammunition,the police almost always discovered Bibles when they raided the camps of bandits.  Those young people believed in the Lord, so they had not gone that far away from their mothers’ teachings;so how does one with any rationality equate their cold-heartedly blasting a father, a mother, a baby to death unless someone whom they had trusted persuaded them that this is the right thing to do?  And why weren’t there programmes within the educational, religious, and societal systems effective enough to have guided those children into making the right choices?

Single mothers are often overwhelmed and oftentimes lose control over their own as well as their children’s lives, so why was an entire community indifferent when those mothers needed help to guide their children in the right direction?

Many a single mother and I have trod that path; but there is an eternal message for the mothers of these young men:  do not hang your heads in shame. because mothers everywhere try their utmost for their children.  You have not failed as a mother as much as we have failed collectively as a nation.  The blood of the innocents is on the hands of those who guided the hands of your children to pick up the guns.