God ignores gimmickry! FROM ALL appearances the call for citizens to wear yellow and indulge in two minutes of prayer on Tuesday attracted little participation. Indeed, even God must have been somewhat unimpressed. I must give the organisers credit for trying to piggyback their effort on the Reggae Boyz craze. From past occasions they knew that many people had yellow shirts, so could be expected to turn out in yellow without much outlay and effort. But even that did not happen. I had business to transact in New Kingston that day and the only authentic turnout in yellow I saw was on the woman behind me in the bank line. I did see about three other yellow garments but these were well-worn soiled items being worn by people who obviously had them on out of necessity. The reason for the response, I suspect, is that most people today are unimpressed with symbolism. They have long learnt that a band-aid is useless when it comes to a stubborn sore foot. Those who are religiously inclined ought to by this have realised that even if God answers prayers he is hardly likely to respond to gimmickry. The admonition to "render your hearts and not your garments" seems to support this. What were the collective prayers doing while the country had been going to hell in a handcart? How many fiery sermons have been preached about the gun culture and the murder and mayhem that attend it? What efforts have been made to cleanse the collection plate of money tainted by rascality or tarnished by blood? How many of the 'bawl out' prayers have personal knowledge of guns and say nothing? Just recently I spoke to an acquaintance who attends church regularly in one of the gun-infested communities. He told me that going to and coming from church he was tired of seeing little boys with guns. And he added that you can't even look at them directly for fear they would kill you. I am almost certain that if religious persons throughout the island told what they know it could make a vast difference in the situation. I was amazed to listen to those religious persons who got media exposure when they visited the latest troubled area in the wake of the recent upheavals. With the single exception of Father Richard Albert, I never heard a squeak from them about the murderous illicit guns. I recall another time, another age when the gun made the first great bid to become our new slave master. I was assigned to cover the late Anglican Bishop Percival Gibson's appearance at the Kingston Parish Church at Parade. Calling on the country to take steps to stamp it out he decried the fact that assassinations at rockbottom prices were being arranged and that divine judgement would be visited on the nation as a consequence if it didn't take heed and action. I returned to the newspaper and told the news editor in advance that Bishop Gibson had been more candid than I have ever heard him. I turned in the story fully expecting it to fuel a firestorm. Alas it was downgraded to two paragraphs, chiefly about the function, and carried eventually on the back page. I believe it was a month or so after that Bishop Gibson died. Suddenly I was summoned with much excitement, "Reynolds wey di Bishop Gibson story deh. You realise seh you a di las man who cova him?" My reply was that I had given him the full story promptly. I told him my notes had been discarded, though truthfully I never bothered to look, for them. There is no shortage of other people who have given us early warning, a glimpse of the future, if you wish. For instance, about the early 1970s a senior British police officer was here as part of a programme to familiarise himself with conditions in the country from which a substantial number of his constituents in Britain came. RJR then had a popular Sunday hour-long discussion programme called 'Exposure' and this police officer was our guest one Sunday. Guns and ganja were two of the current concerns. Uptown was not very exercised about the gun violence yet since it seemed to have been confined to areas like Western Kingston. And as for ganja it appeared to have similar geographical confines. But this was the police officer's take on the situation. He told us that it was not ganja per se that was the problem. It was the medium it provided for acquiring the guns. As for the gun violence? It was just a matter of time before it acquires the necessary leadership it needs to move out into the rest of the society! But now that the monster has come of age we are expecting two-minute mini-prayers to induce God to work a miracle. The whole thing is not more convincing nor logical than to accept the insistence of a radio talk show caller that God has taken up residence on Red Hills. C. Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.
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