It is hard to imagine a worse start to 2009 than the bloodshed that has proven so far to be a fortnightly occurrence. With the exception of Mr. Joseph King, who at age 54 and killed through being stabbed; is the anomaly in this catalogue of senseless violence the victims have met their untimely end through illegal guns. Two of these victims; Isimba Bradley and Drusan Hendricks have not even attained their 20th birthday while the other Shawn Williams is reportedly a case of mistaken identity.
This is madness that defies belief despite the graphic and bloody evidence of cold dead flesh. How could this society have fallen so far and so fast in just over a decade? It goes without saying that such a drastic change cannot have simply materialized out of nothing. Seeds of “don’t send your children to school” and “no commissioner can stop me” and politically motivated killing of senior police officers and disappearances of innocent children to get at ambassadors were brazenly sown in the fertile ground of young minds. That nakedly violent and wildly successful overthrow of law and order has been invoked and remembered both proudly just prior to the General Election of 2004 with “I can incite you know, remember 1993” and painfully with much grief and suffering in the unstoppable killing spree since then.
