We cry shame on a situation where police have to be deployed on public school campuses.

We insist: – this nation’s schools could and should be healthy places where violence and its threat should have no place.

To the point then:- No child with a history of violence and deviance should be mixed in with youth who are healthy enough, peaceful enough and inquisitive enough to yield to the discipline that comes packaged in with the school’s authority.

It troubles us to no end to see a situation where armed police have to be put on patrol in places where this nation’s youth are supposedly being prepared to take their places – as citizens and nation-builders – on one fine day in the future.

Perhaps some of this nation’s youth in savage mimicry of some of their parents, neighbours and friends now strut about armed to the teeth.

We are told that some of them are thieves; that some of them routinely sell sex and that some of them would run riot when and wherever they choose.

Some people close to the action tell us that some of these feral youth also sell ganja; stolen cell-phones and a host of other contraband.

Today, these people seem fated to become men and women who from the get-go are familiar with police, their instruments of violence – and with fear!

This is surely a sad sign of despair in a time that is so very sad.

What we do know is this: Home-grown thugs have decided to – as it were – tear this nation’s social fabric down to the last thread.

Every one of these gangsters would have spent year piled upon fearful year in this or that public school as its grounds were being patrolled by this or that policeman.

This is but one of the sources of today’s persistent crime surge and scourge.

Sadder still is that we now have in our midst swamps that now breed and harbor all manner of social pests which – if given the chance – will destroy everything civilized in their feral path.

Indeed, were more Bahamians predisposed to looking in on some of the matters that routinely make the news in Jamaica, we are quite certain that they would be struck by the number of similarities between them and their Bahamian counterparts.

Of greatest significance would be the extent to which gun-violence has become endemic in both countries.

There is also that drugs connection that links Jamaica to a Bahamas that has become a hub for the movement of ganja and other-such contraband to markets in the United States of America.

The bottom line is surely that – we are to staunch the blood-shed and also build stronger and more honest societies in this region – we need more help from the United States of America.

Were we obliged to sum up what this so-called ‘great’ little nation happens to be in truth and in fact, we would admit – albeit sadly – that our native-land has always been a smuggler’s paradise and that, its masses have always borne the deleterious effects of such nefarious trading.

In a sense, rum-running in the 1920’s would have laid the foundations for the rot and ruin of alcoholism in the same manner that, the trade in cocaine would have had its cruel effects on today’s generations of Bahamians.

A similar set of conclusions apply to ganja.

Our troubled Bahamas is as it is precisely because it has neither capacity nor will sufficient to resisting the siren call either of guns and drugs or the easy allure of money that is to be made on the quick.

This leads us to conclude –as other right-thinking Bahamians have already concluded – the troubles we face on the crime front are due to what has gone down not only in the past ten or twenty or even thirty years; but to the Bahamian penchant and desire to get rich quick regardless.

Sadly, many Bahamians die trying.

In a sense, this is our youth’s hidden curriculum.

And just perhaps, this can and does not only explain our collective fascination with guns and violence.

It also suggests that things will get even worse as one generation of Bahamians educated with fear as the backdrop is succeeded by others.

In time, we will have the social equivalent of two cities while living cheek to jowl in the innards of the same nation are as different as chalk is from cheese; with one being a place where children are happy, disciplined and made for effective leadership and that other oppressive place where life is nasty, brutal and short.