Some shoulders are asked to carry so much that they crack; don't mind what they say that we are never given more than we can bear. (What else explains suicide?)
Some shoulders carry so much that they grow broad and sturdy; adversity rendering remarkable dimensions. Such shoulders support the mind of a woman who has long been my role model. Angela Cropper has been repeatedly surfacing in my thoughts these days, perhaps invoked by the clamour for the death penalty.
Angela, who is now Special Advisor to the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has been an outspoken critic of the death penalty for years and an advocate of human rights and sustainable development, among many other salutary activities that are internationally respected.
Locally, her name might be recognised for its connection to the Cropper Foundation which she founded with her husband, John; or it might be associated abroad with the Dev Cropper Memorial Award named for their only son who died suddenly of heart failure at 20 while a final-year student at the London School of Economics in 1998;or it might be recollected in a more horrific manner. In December 2001, while Angela was abroad, the family home was robbed and her husband, her mother, Maggie, and her sister, Lynette were killed. Found with their throats slit.
Can you even begin to imagine how a body, how a soul collects itself after such loss? Your loved ones all gone, just so?You are supposed to go on—go where?
The great grandson of Maggie was one of two men sentenced in 2004 to hang for the murders. That verdict had come just a week after the Privy Council had reversed its 2003 ruling that the mandatory death penalty for murder in Trinidad and Tobago was unconstitutional. After the murders and during the trial, calls for the death penalty raged; pretty much as they are now, and Angela, an Independent Senator, was asked if she had changed her views, and once again she rebuked it.
She was quoted as saying, "I question the principle of capital punishment. I know that this is a risky position to take, given the present state of our society and the fear that grips us all. The society seems to accept the death penalty as a way of dealing with crime but we do so without any public dialogue about how effective or ethical it is...the more we stomach capital punishment the more inured we become to violence."
She said elsewhere that while she believed that people should pay penalties when they injure society, she felt it should stop short of taking lives. She said she knew her husband and sister were against the death penalty. "I can speak for them with confidence because of my knowing that, like me, they felt any killing, whether it is committed by an individual or by the State itself, is a step too far." Voices are again heavy and hoarse from screaming for vengeance. In a place where murders and now suicides have surfaced with blinding intensity, we are still averting our eyes from the real issues. As the mind tries to wrap itself around the idea that someone could beat a child and throw him out of a window to his death, or flush another's head in a toilet bowl, one can become enraged enough to think violent thoughts.
But these incidents ought to bring reflection about why they happen.
Imagine a conversation between a three-year-old and an adult. It might go something like this:Adult says something. Child: Why? Adult responds. Child: But why? Adult explains. Child: But why?
A whole week could go by and the child would happily pursue that line of questioning. That's how they learn. That curiosity helps them to understand their world. Perhaps because the school system has been designed to drum that way of learning out of children, we've ended up a society that has no interest in understanding.
So we are not asking what has disfigured our men and women. We are not examining the coarse sandpaper we are rubbing them with from infancy; we are not exploring the contexts of their lives to help us to help them to become themselves. We set ourselves apart; adorning ourselves with such righteous crowns that we sit like Queens of Hearts shouting "Off with their heads!"
A long moment of true introspection would tell us that these are not the actions of mentally stable people. A longer moment might cause us to consider that we have all had our mental hinges unpinned enough to make our own responses fall right into the garden of evil that we so roundly condemn.
At this point in the thickening history of this country, can we afford to forget that violence begets violence? Can we really continue to distract ourselves past our living realities with discussions that take us nowhere while too many more of our shoulders crumble from the pressure? Can we not heed Angela's song?
Email: vaneisabaksh@gmail.com
