This side of the Kinel

Graduation season has coincided with the open season for Jaguars. Yap, right on cue like acne break outs at the starting line of pubescent anxiety, the reckless juvenile energies of excess, relief and rebellion  are already revving their under-aged engines.

Proudly accommodating parents who have been tickled to ecstasy by having a child who has not ended up as a statistic on the pink slip of the new Minister of Police or a six thousand dollar employment opportunity for Coye or Leiva let their kids unwind without supervision. The absence of supervision is after all justified because most of these children have held on to some measure of discipline in the academic plantation of secondary school. They got a couple of things right, so it is safe to assume that our luck with their choices will continue – at least on the average.

The suspension of our smothering tendencies as parents is compounded by the fact that the once ankle biting rug rats are only months away from finally taking on their own heartaches, jobs and stresses.  High school, Sixth forms and Universities, to some degree, are spitting out these bright-eyed and uninhibited gangs of youngsters. For the youngsters, it is the bewitching spirit of Prom which overdoses the present after its long struggle with the scholastic rehabilitation of the past so much that it entrances them into total indifference for the fragility of the future.

Yeah, let’s get it started!!!! The defiant swarm of graduates with all the tension of a stretched slingshot and fully armed with the untested ignorance of teenage perspective, infest the shoreline of Belize City. It is a high. Unadulterated bliss!

North side kids confident they will get away with it, hijack their parents SUVs, 9mms and ATM cards. Most times, they are off to score a point with some unconquered love interest or to monopolize the leading role in some drunken misadventure of delinquency.

The sense of freedom and the detachment from responsibility is packed into their movements and choices. Motorcades of fancy vehicles fueled with warm pituitary gland juice, twelve year old scotch, and grey gooses race up and down Marine Parade only to take brief pit stops in front of Battlefield Park to belch out speaker boxes full of Lady Gaga and Justin Bierber. (Yeah trust me on this one. Those are the names of popular teen idols on this side of the kinel.)

But lurking in the concrete jungle of the city are hungry, envious and overworked jaguars which are prowling in the shadows. They growl and boil as they know that the insulting immunity that these spoilt brats wield is more than their pay scale can handle. They know that without a doubt the least prepared of the lot has in their wallet more for this one night than the constable will take home for the month – in honest above the table earnings. And it irks them but that is the law on this side of the kinel.

They stare, casting a slave eye on the masters’ children, and prepare to pounce on any profitable situation which is so far beyond excuse that it can be justified to a superior officer or earn them some “extortable” hush money.

Most of these kids barely scrape dog through the final year of classes despite having bought all their books brand new; paying some speaky spokey tutor for five forty dollar sessions a week; and sleeping in orthopedic beds while covering from the air conditioner. But tonight in plain sight the under-age drinking, reckless driving and public nuisances will be tolerated, even excused – at least on this side of the kinel.

Drinking in public and urinating in public is not punishable on this side of the kinel if the trousers which are unbuckled are two hundred dollar skinny jeans and the drink is not pronounced the way it is spelt.

But downwind of the kinel, the aggravated jaguars want to release steam too. They want to explode. Tired, sticky, frustrated and underpaid.  Downwind from the kinel, only one of the boys who managed to enroll in high school finally will graduate. He will graduate in spite of only having some of the required texts and being “demeritted” for not being able to afford it. He will graduate after being strong willed enough to sit and study amid the loud cursing of his frustrated single mother and inhaling the stale second hand whiffs of his brother’s hydro.

So tonight is the one night where he plans to get on his step-brother’s beach cruiser and take a drink of shake up or two dollars wine from his primary school friends whose sister has graduated from high school too.

Dress up no puss back foot. After pretending to walk out, his discounted jeans are forty nine ninety five from the Turks on Albert Street and his double XL shirt has 2Pac barely peeping out over his hundred and ten pound frame.  Yeah, he has been called a “pussy” not in the feline way, and been told that he is a “soft pops” by the neighborhood hustlers, for as many times as he has been be ridiculed for his high water pants in school. But tonight is going to be a good night because he survived everything.

Now, a drink, then back home, to sleep because as a bag boy on Saturday mornings you have to be sharp.

Turning into Boots Crescent, on his way to the party, Jaguar Paw is all over some of his cousins who were buying Guiness at the Chiney. He smirked and shook his head as “di man dey” bax up the whole set like pickney and throw their bikes into the pan of the pick-up.  Yap, that entire set will lick down “wah faughty eight fi C. P.!!!!

He continues his ride to notice that a girl he had gone to primary school with was on her step without her two year old baby, so he throws down his bike and decides to “halla” at her.  The plywood house is all abuzz because the girl’s brother just “let off” wah pack and so Guiness and weed deh bout. This is not his scene but the girl is. As he takes his seat on the upside down pig tail bucket beside her,  she smiles just before he asks about her baby but there is no time for a response as jaguar paw raids the yard.

The first thing that comes from the officer in full black, after the nozzle of his eager gun of course,  is “weh part di res a di ting deh deh?” He had been properly tipped off and knows full well that for every one pack that reaches the station, two will not.  It is either the right hook or the butt of the soldier’s M16 that sends the boy in one direction and the bucket in the other, revealing the rusty duct-taped thirty eight special.  Everyone in the yard including the half dressed grandmother is off to the piss-house.

At the same time on the other side of the kinel the group of SUVs decides that the stretch of road between the massive SCA construction site and the roundabout is the best place to spark off some rounds of their father’s firearm that they lifted from his safe. After the ratta-ta-ta, they speed off to the parking lot of Princess where despite not even having a license to drive as yet, they will waltz into the discotheque to blow a public servant’s salary.

But this is Operation Restore. Let us not fool wi self, operation restore is a joke. At its most flattering, Operation Restore is only as successful as Operation Jaguar is a failure.  And Operation Jaguar is simply another way to keep the southside slaves in check. Cold like that.  I no wah hope nor I no wa imagine just because things bad.  Operation Restore = Operation Jaguar and Operation Jaguar is designed to criminalize more people on this side of the kinel.

Have you seen the piece of crap that is written and called Operation Restore. If you ask me, in practice Operation Restore is a discriminatory and status quo protecting program.   Operation Restore Belize is Dean Barrow’s house slave response to the have it alls. It is his oreo cookie pretentiousness to the have nots that this “operation” includes them.

The poor in Belize will have to take all the failures and abuses of “operation restore “ on the chin while some UDP crony gets pool table money. For most of us we will be confused by the chaos that the UDP and Barrow are trying to throw around as being every body’s fault.  No it is not, the PUP doesn’t control the police or appointment of Compol or Ministers of Police or budget cuts or discriminatory operations  that target and kill the future of black youths. Only the poor people and their families  are being extorted, shackled beaten and abused by the Police who have been give a full license to act with extreme prejudice. Well at least on this side of the kinel.

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