“It’s a pity youth is wasted on the young”

By anthony sylvestre

George Bernard Shaw (not the retired CNN broadcaster), once grudgingly lamented that “it’s a pity youth is wasted on the young”. The witty Irish playwright is also noted for his truism on nationalism: “A healthy nation,”  he said,  “is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is unconscious of his health.”  But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”

When you look around these days and see what all our youths are caught up in, you would tend to agree with Shaw. Ah mean, you hear of youths murdering and being murdered; youths jacking and being jacked; youths selling drugs and on drugs; youths seemingly doing every conceivably negative thing. At least that is what is propagated in the news cycle daily. Of course, the media will say that they only state the facts. If that is the state of youth in Belize right now, then it’s not so much of a pity that youth is wasted on the young, but rather, that we have been unable to harness the youth in the young.

When the Irish playwright coined the phrase, he was mindful of the fact that youth is that period of a person’s life when you have all this energy, imagination, creativity, skill and talent overflowing. It is also that period of a person’s life on the way to adulthood when he strives to build skills, hone creativity and imagination and competencies in order for him to function positively in life. Clearly then, there is a great responsibility for adults to help youths harness their youthfulness.

The news yesterday of a young man gunned down not too far from his home on Kut Avenue brought home again this sad state of affairs of youth in our country. The youth was from the Queen Square area and lived not too far down the street from where I grew up when I was young. Some years earlier, another youth, a friend of his, was gunned down at almost the same spot, in the same brutal way.

It reminded me of the dangerous lives our youths live and are seemingly compelled to live these days. Just under twenty years earlier, I used to frolic those same streets, but hell, it wasn’t as dangerous as it is now. But back then, when I think about it, we had better role models and every adult in the community used to help out their neighbor with that important job of raising a child. I don’t’ think I could have done anything out of order without being admonished or without that reaching the ear of my mother. And what I found incredible is that even adults who were into mischievous things, did not encourage the young boys into the f—kery that we see adults encouraging and setting up our youths to do these days.

The basketball court right there at the corner of Kut Avenue and Euphrates Avenue (not far from where the young man was slain yesterday) is where myself and other young males from that community got our education about life. But those men back then who hung out in the park and played the ritual basketball from about 4:30 to 8:00 every day, managed the basketball court with a hardnosed discipline. You would constantly hear the men telling the young boys who wanted to fight (as is their wont) to “stop dah r—s”, or they would be banned from playing on the court until they “laan some manners”. Or you too would hear the men telling a youth who would be rolling up a joint of weed to “go smoke that somewhere else”. It’s not that those males were angels, and they certainly didn’t take any child psychology class, but yet they seemed to me to appreciate the fact that condoning a youth in stuff which were beyond their years, was not right and could lead to a road of destruction for that youth. They realized in their own way that youths needed guidance.

But something seemed to me to have gone terribly, terribly out of control around 1994 or thereabouts. I think that’s when the youth on youth vicious killing started to spiral out of control. The UDP government at the time tried to deal with the situation by enacting a law called the Crime Control and Criminal Justice Act. The Minister of Police was given the authority under this law to declare certain areas as crime ridden areas and enable the security forces to search any person or place within that area without a search warrant. That law, of course, did not address the core problem: that is, lack of guidance of our youths.

I remember first fully engaging with the young man who was killed yesterday, back in 1999 when he was eleven or so, at the first ever Queen’s Square Summer Camp. We tried to provide an outlet for the youths at those camps: to expose them to the positive things our country had to offer them, to open their minds and hone their imaginations of the great things that they could achieve. Without realizing back then, we were trying to provide some guidance to the youths from the area.

Governments have an obligation to create the environment to have our youths harness their youthfulness. A government then must have a youth agenda. This government so far has shown that it has no interest in the youth. What has it done for the youth of this country so far? Rather than doing anything for the youth, it has punished the young. Youth programs and initiatives for the benefit of the young are almost non-existent; hell, the Prime Minister fired the second youngest member of his government as Minister of Youth because he dared to expose the hypocrisy in his government. How then can we seriously expect our youth with these state of affairs to cultivate their talent, creativity, and genius into something positive?

Government must do something to address our youth crisis. We too in our communities must do our part. If we do nothing, then mothers, sisters and daughters will continue to cry and the young will continue to waste their youth.

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