After reading the October 27 editorial titled “What’s missing? Rear window, bravery, honour, leadership”, we can understand the Editor’s shock at the news that the football team’s attackers were from the ages of 13 to 16. But that’s about the typical age when it all begins, and has been so for some time.

Many of the infamous groups that have surfaced since 2008 were fuelled by persons as young as 13 and 14; boys just finishing middle school, barely surfacing from puberty. By their mid-20s, they are already battle-hardened and entrenched in years of feud.

The approach to arrest the violence and conflict needs to be comprehensive, including engagement with special developments outside of Bermuda targeted at offering opportunities of entrepreneurship for our young men.

However, it is the things we must do locally that need our most urgent responses and consideration.

Nothing can be more local than our sports clubs. In former days, the clubs were absolutely vital and integral to the development of our young men.

They played an important function to the communities that welded their pride and engagement.

Today those once-functional social entities have lost that status of being beneficial and have in too many cases become hazards to their neighbourhoods. It takes money to bring change and, before money, it takes an idea and a commitment from the community to foster a new idea.

The future of any club and society is built on the development of its youth.

Therefore, it is imperative that the facilities and grounds be fit and safe for youth to develop. It is time that the entire community, including the churches, school boards, civic and community leaders come together to retool and reinvent the role of the clubs, which are effectively in their neighbourhoods.

The clubs for the most part are not owned by private individuals as a personal interest. The clubs were built to serve the community by men who in many cases saw a benevolent cause.

You can trace scholarships and support for education and other charitable functions with the origins of the clubs. We need a revolution that begins with a community-sponsored remake of our working men’s clubs. We can only gain and in the process save the future of sport and sportsmanship because as they exist at present, it is failing.

Remaking the clubs should not be a hard sell. Club leaders should welcome it and the community should embrace it.

This is an area where the churches can fulfil that mandate of “Go ye into world and the highways and byways”.

There is no point in looking pert or well dressed in the church pew, when your cousin and nephew are being shot or stabbed at the club just over the hill. This is a cause for everyone — let’s get to it.

Grab the mission as our grandfathers did and make every aspect of our community truly functional.