EACH ONE TEACH ONE – PART 1
By Dr. Suresh Kurl
It has been more than 16 years since the execution of the notorious Southasian gangster “Bindy” Singh Johal. However, it feels as though his ghost is still lurking around searching to occupy several able bodied, minimally educated and poorly parented youngsters, with highly inflated ego and poor self-esteem to replace him.
April 18th LINK issue printed eight snapshot of very young looking gangsters. I believe they have to be ambitious, aspiring enough and hoping to fill Bindy’s vacuume, or they would not jump on the first page of the weekly. Their crime region — Surrey-Delta– would certainly put enormous pressure on all the three levels of their governments, including non-governmental agencies.
After a lot of brain storming sessions in bed, my thinking region since retirement, I came up with the following thoughts on family violence and parenting. Hope the LINK readers find them useful. But before I start counting and listing them, a little background of the thought process would be necessary, I believe.
Conscience is the “superego or introjected set of moral and ethical values acquired from the parents,” as described by lexicologist Dr. J.P. Chaplin. It is that abstract power that guides our behaviour. I call them memes. (Read: My Genes and Memes; desi-Today; Vol.6; Issue-I; Feb-March 2015).
All those thoughts and activities that are right and good result from our moral and ethical values. But what about all those hurtful activities we commit? We acquire them from our parents as well.
From 1976 to 2003 was the toughest period of my life. But it was also my biggest learning period. This was the period when I grew. All those degrees I had earned from different universities taught me to earn, but the learning I did outside those universities taught me how to live and raise a family, with dignity.
During this period, I associated with a world of parents involved in drugs alcohol and crime, while living in hand-to-mouth poverty. I knew parents, who would barter their grocery bags — purchased from their monthly welfare cheques — for drugs and alcohol, instead of taking those bags home and feed their starving children. The next day they returned to their welfare offices and report their entire cash was stolen the night before and plead for emergency funds.
Once in the middle of night, I received a phone call, “I have found your phone number, I can find your home or give my children back to me. (His children were in government protection because of the heinous crime he had committed against their mother). Second time, I was threaten with an injection filled with HIV/Aids contaminated blood, and third time, with a threatening phone call, ” I would blow your brains if you failed to deal with my appeal favourably, right away.”
My parents were poor. Poverty is no excuse to be cruel, callous and selfish, but it does, when life is lived with addiction. Addiction with poverty makes you thoughtless of your duty (dharma), immoral and unethical.
As Member of the National Parole Board, I came in contact with thieves, counterfeiters, bank-robbers, drug traffickers, rapists, paedophiles, and off course murderers. They were skilled in deflecting issues, giving a well thought and well rehearsed justification for their criminal behaviour and expressing a self-serving remorse. They gave me a crash course on the dark side of life in a very short period. Once, a convicted killer corrected me, in the middle of his parole hearing, for misusing the word “murder,” instead of “manslaughter”.
Their case-histories disclosed their tangled lives; their psychological, psychiatric and medical details, their disjointed family and social history, the gory details of their crimes, and of course, their contributing and mitigating factors. Here are a few examples of the criminal offences that would come before me to assess their eligibility for parole.
1. Crimes occur for varieties of reasons — from a simple provocation to out right challenges to offenders’ ego. Let’s call them mitigating factors. This generally happens when both the offender and his victim are under a heavy influence of intoxicants–drugs or alcohol, or a combination of both. The ingestion of substance, as you might already know, causes the consumer to behave irrationally, irritably and with over confidence. Intoxicants disconnect an offender from his most valuable asset, “Conscience.”
The next morning, when the offender wakes up he/she finds his friend, with whom he had been partying the night before, lying next in a pool of blood. The horses of self-defence start racing. He starts with black-out, loss of memory — “Don’t know what happened; was too drunk to remember; to drunk to kill.”
2. Crimes occur with a clear motive. He plans his crime. He goes in the middle of the night; armed with a knife, a gun, a rope a tape. He carries these weapons to intimidate and force his victim into submission. Victim wakes up. Robbery goes bad. The victim fights back; struggle ensues, the victim gets shot or stabbed and ends up dead.
Brain starts shifting gears. Thoughts of self-defence kick in. The offender covers up his tracks. He blames the victim for his death. “He left me no choice but to fight back. “I was not in his house to kill him. I went to steal to feed my habit (to buy drugs).”
3. Crimes occur when an individual gets involved in get-rich-quick-schemes — drug trade or counterfeiting. They are big businesses; covers a vast area, within and beyond Canada. Counterfeiting does not have to include violence, but drugs and violence go hand in hand. In this business, threat, intimidation, and murders are tools of conflict resolution, and any loss of life is collateral damage. Experts call it, “Systemic violence.”
4. Drunk drivers are dime a dozen. Lots of these offenders have come before me. I used to tell them that when they were drunk and driving they were not driving a vehicle. They were driving a loaded missile without navigational maps. “When you do that and trigger a police chase by not stopping and waiting for the police you move into an active mode of scheming a self defence; how to avoid not taking responsibility for your offence. And that in my books is a conscious effort to avoid learning to grow up. Could you deny that?”
