YeKengalé

Maybe it’s the logical counter to the resilient tendency to forget the traumatic past and move on to better things, but we construct living altars to pain. One would think that  three or four generations removed from the tragedy, a community would be ready to move on.

Those were different times. You can’t judge Bustamante through present prisms of political morality without properly immersing yourself in the context of the times. Politics is about choices. Political decision making is as far removed from the puritanical contemplation of philosophical moralists as is NASA headquarters from the oil and grime stained mechanic emerging from some precarious position, tools in hand, beneath the labyrinth of nuts and bolts on some monstrous and messy engine.

But whether it be the Coral Gardens Massacre, or the gas chambers of Hitler or the generations of Africans buried in the Atlantic,  as ridiculous for some as may be the comparison between the Founders of both Parties (JLP and Nazi), in the eyes of the victims of torture, murder and genocide, evil is pure evil.

It’s a slippery slope. Our wisdom traditions the world over remind us of our apparently unlimited capacity to sink into the black-hole of moral depravity given the right circumstances (the promise of darkness) and a strong enough dose of power’s intoxicant. We all seem capable of the very worst.

Certainly for myself, if there is one thing I had prided myself in, was my love for and sensitivity towards children – a gift enabling me to serve and help many. Like Michael Jackson (the irony….I know), I repudiated the thought of the abuse of children. Yet, as an educator pioneering the abolition of the strap as a tool of discipline (the irony….. I’m telling you…) I remember being provoked to wrath by a certain test case in the form of a scrawny, nine year old pipsqueak of a child, who somehow possessed the temerity to emphatically tell me, his school principal, to ‘go suck out yu mada!’

That was my trigger for when text book solutions are thrown out the window and one reaches back for the applied wisdom of generations. It was only in the aftermath of my exertion in considerable self righteous indignation that I became aware of the ‘marked’ physical abuse which I was not only capable of, but now manifestly responsible for, which (but for an understanding parent, herself exasperated by the unruliness of her child) could very well have landed me in the center of a community scandal, and perhaps, in another context of time and place, prison.

I located the fittest male teacher on staff after school. I gave him the same strap, and instructed him to use it on me with all his might to remind me what a whipping actually feels like, because I had clearly forgotten. (A most memorable whupping. This is about the third time I’m blogging about it). Only in remembering, as every Holocaust victim knows, is there restraint.

Our values are ultimately not enshrined in law books, religious texts, national constitutions, or any such; although that may seem to be the case….i.e until a malevolent power comes along to try our institutions. Power knows that constitutions, laws ….and all our tablets of stone are easily broken to pieces or reduced to malleable clay if a people can be uprooted from their historical moorings, lulled to sleep by distracting entertainments, their conscience thus supplanted, the herd mentality whipped up by  alluring charisma….it renders them to be led unquestioning, unthinking, and unaware into oblivion.

Values are ultimately coded in common sentiment, the fruit of collective memory, which if lost there, leaves us open to quick reversion to pre-civilizational tendencies as Darfur, Congo, Uganda in fairly recent times should remind us. Visiting those places now, like children, having recovered from their trauma almost as if it never happened, the resilience of the human spirit may tempt us into the perennial eulogizing of our histories….as the song says,

“It’s the laughter we will remember when we remember the way we were.”

On this Good Friday / Bad Friday (depending which tragedy you choose to remember) it is apropos to recall the grim reality of choice and consequence, the price paid in human suffering for the abuse of human privilege and power. Whoever hangs from the crosses on our altars of pain, and whether our privilege and power be teacher’s strap, parent’s belt, politician’s pen, pastor’s pulpit, policeman’s pistol, or whatever social position we may have appropriated since our release from slavery’s chains; by memorializing pain, let us nourish and cherish the common value we have for justice, truth and mercy in our society, lest we forget.