The Illusion of Splendor... (Towards Anger Management)

When my son was not yet quite three years old he asked me a question that, even though I was accustomed to his searching, uncharacteristically-deep-for-his-age questions, still managed to catch me off guard and left me grasping to string something like a coherent or even logical response together. A little backstory is required here as the particular circumstances of our family life required that we spend every afternoon between five and seven together, so one day while we were on one of our little afternoon 'find something to do' jaunts, out of the clear blue he looked up and asked me (as if he was pondering it on his own for some time at first) what it meant to be a father. Not what it 'felt like' mind you (which would have been a lot easier to answer), but what it 'meant,' and I found myself struggling to put what I thought it meant into words. Sixteen years later and despite him being a legal adult and a full man in his own right now, I still find myself at times trying to answer that same question everytime we have to deal with something new. To be honest I did not have such a good relationship with my own father growing up despite the excellent relationship we have today, and I think my becoming a father so unexpectedly and being so amazed at this little person who always appeared like he was trying to devour the whole world put things in a  different perspective and helped me grow my own self up along the way.

The only thing I had then was my own personal view (so new was I to the concept of fathering myself) I told him that if ever your back is to the wall and no one else is around, your father would be. That a father protects and a father provides, a father answers questions and if he couldn't he'd go find the answers. I got to thinking about this today after receiving a call from the principal of a Port of Spain Secondary School who, at her wits ends for solutions and reaching out to anyone reached out to the Jericho Project and got me. She asked if we would be interested in coming to the school to talk to her male students, many of whom had no fathers and were acting out angrily because of it and I said yes of course. Speaking bravely on behalf of many of our stronger, more well known and qualified male members I said we would definitely be interested in helping and the relief in her voice could be felt over the phone.

So many of the problems that plague our society comes from the destructive cycle caused by bad or non existent parenting, leaving young developing minds at the mercy of much of the puerile drivel that Hollywood and the music industry keeps dreaming up to warp them. We've found ourselves in a place where gangs have replaced the family, and instead of trying to find out what is happening to the family and fixing it, we're attacking the gangs. Is it that we are so bankrupt for ideas that all we know is war? The needs for human connection will not be denied and if anything all we're doing is introducing violence and advantage into an already difficult equation. These children need surrogate parenting, functional schooling, hope and opportunity and they desperately need our understanding, our caring and our love.

The first pillar of the unwritten social contract implores that our society owes it to itself for the strong to look after the weak; it is a non negotiable condition of our humanity that we all start and end weak, and if the point is lost on us in the beginning it surely will hit home in the end if, along the way of living selfish lives we sow the seeds of our own unhappiness and destruction. We can only know peace in the sunset of our days if we build a peaceful world while we could and the choice between barbed wire and open fences is still ours to make. As the saying goes you cant plant oranges and pick apples, and if what we want are healthy adults making healthy choices then we need to raise ALL the children of this nation with that goal in mind.