BC's B'dos - On the off beat

BY B.C. PIRES

THESE ISLANDS were never civilised, merely occupied, and not even for the benefit of those who lived in them, but for those who dictated, loftily and from afar, all that happened here.

The surest sign we have not begun to think for ourselves is the eagerness, from pulpit to Parliament, to beat children into submission instead of raising them to independent adulthood, the only point from which the free, responsible individual may hope to assert citizenship.

We seem determined to deny our history, rather than learn from it. Why else would we, who have been so wounded by the whip, venerate it? The indigenous populations of our territories were casually murdered and new, enslaved populations imported by great and cruel force to toil from morning to night in almost unbearable heat for centuries.

Not even the relative few who cracked the whip instead of being flayed by it benefited, for their putative gains were ill-gotten, genuine blood money, and no decent person can live comfortably knowing he does so at the cost of someone else's great suffering.

Our sort of history is not overcome by beating children but by refusing to do it. For 400 years, the bad Negroes of the West Indies have been whipped into shape; it is time to stop it now, out of ignoble self-preservation, if not enlightened self-interest: for the abused children of today will become the bandits and cold-blooded murderers of tomorrow.

Look to Trinidad if you want clear illustrations of what unloved, abused children will do, in the fullness of time: boys in their teens slit throats and slice off breasts that might have suckled them. Whip such boys now, when they are defenceless, at your own future peril.

When we flog children for being late for school, we invoke the same spirit that allowed men on horses to whip women in fields for not working hard enough; that alone should cause us to hold our hand.

And, if there is merit in the argument that, once flogged, they are no longer late, then the best way forward must be even greater punishment: cut off a foot if the student strays from school towards the ZR bus stand; the slave owner of old would tell you he won't hobble far again.

But do you not admire the slave who lost both feet, then both hands, and still stuck his tongue out defiantly until Massa cut that off, too? Where does the spirit of our own freedom truly endure? In the good worker or the rude bwoy?

The united West Indian nation will be built on the shoulders of free, upstanding citizens, not on the backs of flogged, submissive creatures. We don't need dues-paying, unionised workers demanding minimum wage; we need unrestricted entrepreneurs creating our own wealth.

No whipped person becomes free thinking. Our challenge, since Independence, has not been how to keep the broad mass of our population in servitude, but how to set it free. As long as West Indian children are beaten, West Indian adults are less than they should be.

Instead of perpetuating violence and the wanton exercise of unquestioned power - a form of authority derived, not from The Bible, but the plantation - we should be striving today to love and respect our young people; who may yet lead us out of the bondage of violence at some distant tomorrow.

*BC Pires is flogging a dead brain.Email him at bc@caribsurf.com