The greatest love of all!

May 26, 2019 Countryman

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By Dennis Nichols
It’s almost the halfway point between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day 2019. At this juncture, we adults may want to pause and reconsider our roles as parents and caregivers to our children – the responsibility we bear to those who had no say over their entry into this world – in light of the continual atrocities and daily barbarisms they endure, some from the moment of birth to the extinguishing of their brief light.
From the time I became aware that the world didn’t revolve around me, that is, about the time I got to the double-digit years, I realised that some children were experiencing far worse than my family’s relative poverty which crammed nine of us into a modest two-bedroom cottage. Up to then at least, I was happy.
The population of Planet Earth is about 7.5 billion souls, give or take a few million. (Guyana has a fraction of a fraction of one percent of them) Thousands starve to death every day. Tens of thousands are abused, neglected, and killed, often by parents, relatives, and caregivers every year. Yet the preventable death of one toddler bothers us intensely. Why?
The aura of innocence and appeal that defines childhood is an awesome thing. It goads the maternal instinct in a mother to confront danger and risk death in protection of her offspring. It enlarges and emboldens fatherhood to labour for its providence and security. And it should stir all of us, adults, to defend its sanctity. Instead we shorten, mutilate, and too often, end it.
Thankfully, the ‘we’ I speak of are relatively few, although their actions may be wildly disproportionate to their numbers. And although the maternal protective instinct is an especially potent one, mothers are just as likely to kill their children as fathers are, for whatever reason.
In all likelihood, I will go to my death never understanding the mind or the heart that plots and/or executes harm against a child. I’m not talking about the kind of occasional frustration a parent may experience that triggers a verbal reprimand or a slap on the gluteus maximus, although we have to be careful not to transfer our anger to a child’s penchant for mischief.
What I’m referring to is what seems to be the deliberate and frequently selfishly-motivated abuse of children, especially the very young, sometimes resulting in their demise. In Guyana, the archetypal example is that of the ‘ritualistic’ murder of six year-old Lillawattie in 1950.
Many Guyanese know the details of the inhumane killing for which three adults were hanged in December 1960, and which Kaieteur News columnist Michael Jordan, among others, has kept alive in the public’s memory with intermittent retelling of the gruesome tale. And although I have written twice about the abuse of children in this column, I feel it is necessary to keep the issue in the forefront of public attention.
Knowledge sparks awareness and interest, which in turn may trigger empathy and action resulting in a diminution of cases like the following three that accounted for the death of four children, the eldest being just four years old. They are not necessarily the most gruesome, but their circumstances and the way in which society views such perpetrators give a compelling insight into the human condition. The first two happened here in Guyana.
The first, in 2014, saw then 21 year-old Awena Rutherford administer rat poison in tablet form to her two children, Jabarie and Odaceia Cadogan at their Mahaicony home. They were one year and four years old respectively. Both toddlers died shortly after. Miss Rutherford denied giving them a poisonous substance, saying the pills were medication for a cold and that she herself had taken two. Jury and judge disagreed, and in 2018 she was sentenced to 98 years in prison.
On the first day of September in 2017, nineteen year-old Sherwyn Roberts broke and entered his brother’s house in Sophia. Later confessing to the police that he was ‘high on weed’, the teenager allegedly ripped a pair of gold earrings from his 18 month-old niece and threw her out a window into a swampy part of the yard. He then buried her alive by piling wood on top. Four months later, following a psychiatric report, he was deemed fit to stand trial, and is currently remanded to prison on a murder charge.
The third case happened a mere three weeks ago in Queens, New York. After receiving a 911 call, police found a man, his clothes afire, running from a burning car. As a Good Samaritan helped 39 year-old Martin Pereira douse himself, firefighters freed his three year-old daughter Zoey from the vehicle, the back doors of which had been chained shut, as the heat melted the handles. The child later died.
Police allege that her father strapped and locked his daughter in the car and started the blaze, amidst a custody battle with the girl’s mother. He has since been charged with murder, although he is still in a Jamaica, Queens hospital recovering from severe burns.
So there you have it! Four very young children who should have felt subliminally safe in their domestic environment murdered, as far as the law is concerned, by the ones who should have protected them and preserved their inviolability. Such irony should not be lost on any of us, and the fact that this kind of thing happens daily in some part of the world should at least provoke in us a watchfulness to minimise or eliminate the scourge.
Remember too that the mother, father, and uncle who ended the lives of those four children were once babies and toddlers wholly dependent on their parents and caregivers. Who knows to what extent that dependence was effected, or defiled? The latter, in my opinion, should definitely be a factor in determining sentence upon conviction. (In this consideration I feel a degree of compassion toward Miss Rutherford; 98 years is a life sentence)
In 1977, two Americans, Michael Masser and Linda Creed created the music and lyrics to “The Greatest Love of All’, a song originally sung by George Benson and later redone by Whitney Houston. It begins ‘I believe the children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way … let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be’. It tops out with ‘learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all’.
Such love begins in childhood; maybe even in infancy, and is nurtured primarily by parents. It blossoms through adolescence, and reaches fruition in adulthood in a continuum that embraces each stage of maturing. Childhood ought to be its spotlight, not its extinguishment.

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