Social media and internet features will deliver the macabre

Beyond anything that Hollywood or make-believe special effects can develop, beneath the watchful eyes of the most adventurous director- twice with Venezuelans in mind – videos have appeared on our news media waves featuring murder and mutilations that are real, brutal and uncensored. To the mature mind (some), this will be rationalised and deposited in the remote areas of the memory. However, the imagery will haunt for times after.

But other pressing life-based issues will supplant the macabre, though not erasing its pictorial features, based on the sensitive nature of each individual.
But what of our juveniles who may have even witnessed the latest and other such uncensored items? They are the generation of the smartphone age. They go places we don’t even think they go on these instruments. This is not exceptional if we reflect on our own childhood to the X-rated picture magazine that turned up in school and held interests and our miniature psychic warning system was all absorbed, that we didn’t even realise that ‘Sir’ had crept up behind the crew until his hand reached out and snatched the hypnotic magazine from his pre-teen students. Things happened back then, nothing that is entirely new today and as frightening as our Jumbie stories.

I was in primary school when young boys went missing. It was a tense period because this happened not too long after the disturbances of the 1960s and because of who the victims were, suspicions were directed along ethnic lines. Eventually the police narrowed their search and the perpetrator was found in Georgetown in the ward of Charlestown, outside of his rural stalking realm. He was not who suspicions proposed he was. He was however, our first captured serial killer (there are others. Michael Jordan is putting together a novel on the subject). The objective mentioned is that there was no glossy imagery for our young minds to explore and regrettably digest.

The reality of news media back then was that it catered for a broad focus. The Sunday editions were looked forward to by the pre-teen for its coloured comic strips. The teenagers had the lyrics for the top song, ‘pick-of-the week’. The adults – book and movie reviews, sports and politics. There were no smartphones or TVs – at least not in Guyana. The fact of today is that social media cannot be censored to the point of rendering it useless. Our challenge is the reflection back to the balance between the spiritual (moral) and material value systems, to find a balance within the home that can find a physical interpretation to confront outside – whether in school or in the neighbourhood.

To this suggestion, I can only relate to my generation in school, when ‘Reading and Art’ were on the timetable. The books constituted a variety that existed in the school library. True, there were not too many storybooks that we could see ourselves in. Yet the concepts that were dealt with did cultivate values that were highlighted by teachers, towards rendering some characters by the way they thought as good, bad or evil. This dynamic has become abandoned through social retrogression, impacting value changes in homes, where we have literally become hunter-gathers.

But accommodation must be made for those who cannot afford the necessary small bookshelf of literature that most families need to have. Today we have a situation that has been ignored for too long. The concept of shaping children’s evolving view of society and their environment through creative constructs envelops the obvious challenges that can damage and construct future interpretations, especially in our country. The media and local and imported social media is saturated with adult perspectives, reports of important world affairs and updates, which are necessary, but out of say, seventy channels we are exposed, to less than twenty, in and out.

What is necessary for context with this column, is space for young minds. I say this as an artist and writer, we have the talents but not the administrative time, interest or awareness permission that would permit the operations to consider an out-of-the -box that should have been in the box as a resonant fixture decades ago. Realistically, the fact is, that we need to stimulate an attention realm with which the Juvenile brain can find interpretations of moral-judgement, and see ‘self-role’ in adventures they can identify with.

In closing, these are old principles that have worked for other nations and even contributed, recognising its impact, was then used as colonising tools against us. The difference applied was who were ‘the principled’ protecting the not so wise. We were most times ‘invisible’ or protected whose ability to self-preserve was presented as inadequate. Today, the same human scenarios exist. This time, within our own governed dynamic, the creative talents will act, write and create to avoid the accusations of posterity. Clarifications today are much easier to access, and media and technology have also created archives of verification.