Deadly duel

On Friday evening, in a residential community in the capital, two young men, armed with knives and hopelessly intoxicated in the moment, set upon each other, inflicting wounds with a crazed sense of purpose. At the end of the no-holds–barred, absence-of-rules duel, each had surrendered his life in pursuit of a settlement of whatever dispute had spawned the confrontation in the first place.

Two young men in a ‘to the death’ knife fight in full public view in a capital city? Georgetown is almost certainly not anywhere close to the first capital that comes to mind. Perhaps, yes, in other parts of the world, where the criminal culture dictates that dispute settlement by duel was the order of the day and where loss of life was a socially acceptable outcome; and yet, right here in our twenty first century Republic, in full public view, on a street in our capital, time reversed itself. Two misguided young men pressed spectators into service to watch them slaughter each other with knives, their deadly duel arising out of some difference that neither, it seems, felt could be settled any other way. 

Perhaps the most bizarre dimension of the report that followed was the stunning and scarcely believable ‘disclosure’ that the deadly duel was triggered by a row, the origins of which are probably still unclear. What is also very likely is that what happened on Friday evening might have been the final chapter of some protracted feud. One media report made mention of’ some ill-defined and hard to fathom dispute over cigarettes. The ‘bottom line,’ whatever it was, was perceived by the feuding parties to hold sufficient cause for killing and for dying.

Afterwards, you try to gain access to the minds of the two now dead men, to try to understand their calculated daring. It could only have derived, surely, from a complete and mind-boggling absence of mindfulness for their respective lives, or else, an intoxication with the hype and the theatre of the moment; a condition   sufficient to spawn a complete indifference to the eventual gruesome consequences of their deadly confrontation. 

It is harder still, to set aside the thought that the lives of the two dead men might not, long before, have been set on a path to last weekend’s final chapter.

 That its root cause of the tragedy might have been, not cigarettes or anything of the sort,   but perhaps, the toxic cradles in which their minds had been nurtured, imprisoned for much longer than we might imagine, is not something that we can simply set aside. You let your imagination drift in and out of their homes, their neighbourhoods, their communities, seeking to conjure up in our minds’ eyes the cumulative experiences served in the end as escorts to early graves.

They knew each other, or at least so it seemed…still, in the moment of a difference over cigarettes (assuming, of course, that the reports are true) their relationship became subsumed beneath a calculated decision to hurt, even kill each other; there was to be no better judgment, no backing away. There is a kind of madness that underpins the mindset here, and it is at this juncture that we are compelled to pause, to contemplate; for it is, surely, a make-or-break crossroads that could take so many of our young people in the wrong direction. It is a curse that simply must be broken or else, we are doomed.

When you eventually drag your mental self beyond the horror of Friday’s bizarre double murder, it alights in an equally distressing place where you begin to ponder the terrifying reality of more like Friday’s two victims and about whether there exists a sufficiently adequate understanding of the phenomenon, a sufficient sense of urgency about the importance of rolling back this kind of mindless, senseless culture of grossly undervaluing lives that is hatched in the hearts of young men for whom existence is no more than an awfully brief ‘fast lane’ experience; where the brevity of life and the permanence of death and the thread of outrageous madness that holds the two together are all of what living is all about.

Friday’s tragedy, surely, must make us wonder, cumulatively, whether in the raising of our children, we do not, often, miss, perhaps, many things; and when you look at the consequences of upbringings which, for one reason or another, ‘come up short,’ you wonder whether, for all the extensive and multi-layered social curricula that begin in some homes and continue through our neighbourhoods, our communities, our schools and the various other tiers of coaching and social control that we experience, we do not, all too often, get it horribly wrong, anyway.

So that Friday’s theatre-of-death episode in Alberttown provides compelling reason for all of us to worry and to respond, to sound a national alert.  

Nor is it a matter of being judgmental, though, truth be told, in the moments of their murderous encounter, sanity must almost certainly have deserted the two young men or, perhaps, their minds had simply descended to a dark and fearful place where the space was simply too crowded with focus and with frenzy to leave room for better judgment. That condition could hardly have derived from anywhere else but considerations that have to do with the blinkered perspectives of the two murdered men on the significance of life and death.  At no point, it seems, did they get to a point where it might have occurred to them that the stakes were simply too high.

On Friday night their respective mindsets took them to a place where they girded their loins to go the proverbial distance. It was the saddest, most, most mindless, most terrible of tragedies that should not be allowed to pass without our wider, more profound contemplation.