an angry father comes home then beats his wife, the wife and mother then vents her frustration by beating the children, and the children express their pent up hostilities by dowsing the neighbor’s cat with gasoline and setting it on fire. The child becomes an angry menace to society, a truant from school and a bully, resorts to crime and delinquency at an early age, gets expelled from school for threatening a teacher, and becomes a habitual criminal as an adolescent, as a young adult, they are indoctrinated into a violent social structure that carriers the misnomer “corrections” or “rehabilitation” but is actually a training facility for those who will likely experience a lifetime of violent maladaptive behavior and exist in a revolving door system of freedom followed by incarceration that will progressively shut them away from “normal society” for longer and longer periods where they will pace their cells in anger for years, hard wired by this time to be robots programmed for crime and violence. If they have a family, their offspring will have an almost doubtless predilection for the same crime and violence patterns of behavior directly proportional to the amount of time they spend during childhood with their socially crippled parent. When they finally meet their fitting end, society will shake its collective head and say, how could a human being become such a monster? The answer is because “society” never gave a shit about them. The most terrifying aspect of this dysfunctional picture is that it is self-perpetuating, continuing generation after maladapted generation.
As a scholar, studying both hard sciences (e.g., Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Physics) and social sciences (e.g., Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology), I had completed major curriculums in Biological Sciences, and Psychology, as well as achieved my doctorate in Chiropractic. Following this decade long plod through five colleges, a stint in the Air Force and having earned a black belt in the martial art of Wu Yung Mun, I should have, would have, begun a career as a practicing Chiropractic Physician. That is had it not been for a trip through a legal, financial, and emotionally exhausting, gut wrenching tour of a labyrinth chamber of horrors of a bitter divorce and child visitation battle. Up until the last two years of Chiropractic College I had been married to my high school sweetheart. One weekend in the summer of 1984 a long brewing discontent I had harbored over the power of structure of our marriage erupted in a showdown. I was tired of having my spouse run every meticulous detail of my life and her intent to dominate my entire career as well. I left to spend the weekend with a buddy in his mountain home and expected to return the following Monday to a wife that was an equal partner rather than a dominating overlord; that had been my ultimatum. Had it worked out as I had expected, I am sure I would have never gained the experience and depth of insight that has prompted me to write this book. The situation rapidly decayed into an unimaginable choice that forever changed the lives of my immediate and extended family.
Until that turning point in my life, I had never realized or appreciated how idyllic my upbringing had been. I had had the good fortune to be born into a modestly wealthy family. I was raised in a loving extended family and had both sets of grandparents living next door to our home on a hill overlooking the city where I grew up. My grandfather owned 80 acres that included the entire hill with a creek and ponds that teamed with deer and other wildlife. I never had dealt with the insecurity of changing schools. My mother excelled in a long career in education and my father was a very successful businessman. Both grandfathers were also quite well known across the state in their respective careers and were pillars of the local community. Both grandmothers doted over me and were always available to listen to every whiney complaint or boyish joy I experienced. I was constantly showered with love, hugs, toys and candy. As far as I knew in my childish way, this was how everyone grew up.
As I dissected in my mind the cultural manifestations I observed in Jamaica, I came to realize that this was essentially the same mechanisms that one might observe in a dysfunctional family, but extrapolated outward from a familial dysfunction to a Cultural Dysfunction Syndrome (CDS). If correct in my assumption, then by regressing through time I should be able to determine the original cultural scenario that had initiated this generationally transmitted blight. I wondered, were the original social conditions in Africa so malignant that this had evolved into the Jamaican society that I saw today? That seemed a bit simplistic, after all they had originated as tribal hunter gatherers there, not that this granted them immunity in some way, as certainly their populations had reached the carrying capacity of their landscape over the millions of years that humans had essentially been “bottled up” on that continent due to climatic conditions that had prevented our common ancestors from following a northern exodus through the harsh northern deserts that expanded and contracted as the planet cycled through various climatic conditions.
After further reflection I believed I had hit upon my answer. Less than one hundred fifty years ago, all these people were slaves! In Jamaica, as elsewhere, masters held absolute power over their human property. They could literally work them to death, starve them, beat them, hang them, rape them, separate families or separate limbs from their bodies. Slave owners held absolute and total dominion over their charges and never, ever, were compelled to treat them with a shred of decency. Naturally, some slave masters would be more humane than others, but there was no societal more that compelled them to do so. If the master was drunk or perhaps didn’t get laid that day, he could vent his frustration by tying up a slave and flogging them until his arm got tired. Now, imagine a child being raised in such an environment, countless sociological studies have documented how being raised in an abusive and violent home dramatically increases the likelihood that those children, as adults, will be many fold more likely to be physical abusers than children who were not exposed to such a harsh environment in their youth. Likewise, children who have one or more family members commit suicide are far more likely to resort to the same method of ending their life than others.
Because dysfunctional families are much more likely to follow in the patterns of abuse that were modeled to them in the environment in which they grew up, than a child raised in a nonviolent home, the pattern is more likely than not to be repeated in their adulthood. The next generation is then indoctrinated in this dysfunctional type of behavior and they, in turn, will probably be abusers as well. And so the cycle continues from one generation to the next. It matters very little if the abuser is a biological parent, step parent, or even slave owner; the cycle continues. In my personal experience, I have met countless persons whom I knew well enough that they would recount their childhood traumas to me that had greatly negatively affected them at the time. These same individuals, I would often notice, later would inflict the same sort of emotional or physical tortures upon their own children when they became parents, often at exactly the same stage of child development as when their trauma occurred, as if they insist that their child endure the same experience. Rare is the individual, who through their own intellect and will power is able to break these damaging behavioral patterns. I believe that the opposite is also true, in that those children who are raised in positive, non-judgmental and non-violent households are extremely more likely to present the same sort of caring environment and behaviors toward their children when they have spouses and raise families. The 150 years since the end of slavery represents between five to ten human generations. It is likely that many of the current generation of Jamaicans retain some elements of this same cultural dysfunction. Because cultural inheritance, like genetic inheritance, can pass its characteristics on through either parent or presumably stepparents, grandparents or other affected family members, it increases the likelihood that someone who carries this negative trait would be present in a child’s life to successfully model this behavior.
But, who is to “blame” for all this, shall we say, cultural dysfunction? It is certainly not the group of Jamaicans I lived with, no, but the “white man.” It was Europeans who chose to engage in the slave trade. They captured or paid others to capture these slaves, ruin their lives and families, chained them up and transported them under horrific conditions from which countless died. They then sold them into servitude for generations and committed atrocities, all in the name of profit. They barred them from using their native languages and taught them an inferior English dialect, forbade them to practice their cultural inheritance, songs or religion. They are the ones who initiated the repeating cycles of abuse and suffering that have continued to this day.
So I do have some group to blame for this atrocity and it is me, my name, my people. Any just God would damn us all for not setting this straight! I see the enemy and he is me. Jamaica, however, is only one example of cultural dysfunction syndrome.