THE nation grieved over the pictures of slain babies in Lusignan. The nation grieved over the slain young UG graduate in Bartica and Corporal Zakeer, along with all those murdered. The nation has grieved over the years over those persons that were kidnapped and slain.

The nation also grieved for the mothers of the victims and the children left as orphans.
But what about the grief in a mother’s heart for the young men (dubbed as bandits, criminals and murderers) who were slain while still relatively young – cut down in their prime during their criminal and even murderous forays.

But they are termed bandits. Evidence points to their ruthless maiming and killing of innocent people. 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 (or young men/women) 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 of 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 in the care of 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 he or she 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 ‘Fine Man’ 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”?
Along with caches of arms and ammunition police almost always discover Bibles when they raided the camps of the criminal gangs. These young people believe in the Lord, so they have not gone that far away from their mother’s 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 have trusted persuaded them that this is the right thing to do? And why aren’t there programmes within the educational, religious, and societal systems effective enough to guide these 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 these mothers needed help to guide their children in the right direction?
The mothers of these young men, if they were mothers trying their best to take care of their children in dire circumstances, instead of guiding them down wrong pathways should not hang their heads in shame, because such mothers everywhere try their utmost for their children. They have not failed as mothers as much as we have failed collectively as a nation. The blood of the innocent is on the hands of those who guided the hands of these children to pick up the guns.