My fellow citizens and residents, halfway through the month of March, our Federation has seen and felt more grief, sorrow, shock, and pain than many of us have ever felt in an entire year.
The month of March has been desecrated by multiple murders and murder attempts. It is no longer possible for our nation to complete the grieving process for one lost soul because the criminal incidents resulting in the loss of lives are sharply following one another, merely hours apart. The soulful wails of brokenhearted families and friends of those suddenly and unjustly taken from us pains far more deeply than words could ever explain. The violence and loss of lives this month is far too heavy a burden than we ought to bear.
Our society and our youth are in crisis. Further compounding this reality and fueling our country’s social dysfunction is a severe lack of leadership at the uppermost levels of our social strata. The foresight and innovation that are desperately needed to craft and execute initiatives aimed at arresting this downward social spiral in which our youth are trapped is blatantly missing. As a result, the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis has almost forgotten how peace and prosperity should look and feel.
Our people must take serious stock of themselves. Before our very eyes, gun violence and bloodshed threaten to reorient our society and become our new normal. To prevent this, we must not allow the current disastrous state of affairs to continue. It is time for us to realise that those whom we beseech for the answers to remedy this problem either provide some that are utterly inadequate or they provide none at all. At the end of the day, our families and friends are left to mourn and weep bitterly while those responsible offer up nothing more than a wreath and a sardonic grin for their pain.
The future of our Federation rests within the hands and minds of our youth. Their survival is paramount to the survival and success of our beloved nation. Far too many lives have been lost. Far too much blood has been shed. Again, I implore the relevant stakeholders in our society, government and private alike, to come together in order to begin the painstaking process of identification and rectification of our nation’s social problems.
Our cooperation in this national endeavor is of utmost importance because each time we lose someone to violence, our country loses a vital piece of itself.
