Some days, in fact most days, the barrage of distressing news on the pages of our daily newspapers is enough to cause despair if not clinical depression.
I’m reading the newspaper of Friday 22 October 2010. As a rule, I am not a drinker, but the information I’m getting is enough to send me to the nearest rum shop. Here are some items:
A Hindu school was broken into on Tuesday night, and 21 computers and $6,000 in cash stolen.
A businessman named Mrs. Ramroop was attacked and robbed at her business place. Two men walked in with guns, ordered Ramroop and her cashier to lie on the floor and got away with $11,000 and jewellery worth $1,300. Police said it was the third time the business was robbed this year.
A two-year-old baby was beaten to death allegedly by a male relative while the child’s mother was at the hospital seeking treatment for her own beating; Gisele Phillip, a “battered wife” who was snatched by her husband and later rescued at a house outside town, is now accusing the police of shooting him.
The St Joseph Road apartment residents affected by Monday’s flood, have decided to continue occupying their homes, but are appealing for government help, and as flood waters subside, heaps of plastic bottles and plastic wrappings littered the city. “We are just dirty,” said the Mayor who complained there are not enough employees to handle the problem of litter.
A 17-year-old schoolgirl Kyle Garcia has been stabbed to death by a schoolmate, and two teenaged brothers, 19 and 17, are charged with stabbing Anthony Moses in the back and head during a fight.
A magistrate on Wednesday said stiffer fines for traffic offences are needed as a “good deterrent” to speeding drivers, and police have cracked a robber ring on the East Coast who have terrorized businesses there.
The Minister of Works and Transport is defending his decision to instruct the Airport Authority to award two contracts to two separate contractors for lighting upgrades, despite the Airport Board’s directive that the work should be given to one contractor.
Joanne Maharaj complains about continuing loud music from vehicles, says the fines should be increased, and that the police are negligent in prosecuting these offenders.
It’s a frightening list, and the gloomy picture it paints is made darker by the knowledge that this is not a spike; most days that’s the kind of depressing array that comes to us in the news.
Having said that however, allow me to surprise you with the information that those stories were indeed in the newspaper, but not in Guyana – they were in the Trinidad Express of Friday 22 October 2010.
Yes, all those incidents laid out there (and actually I left out some) that sound so much like part of the Guyana scenario actually took place in Trinidad. Furthermore, I’m fairly confident that you would get a similar picture of a society in tatters by reading the papers from scores of other countries around the globe.
The lesson there is that as much as we must be disturbed at the array of traumas landing on us here, we often present these things as a Guyanese failure, but in fact these conditions are now replicated all over the world. Mankind it seems is sliding down a constantly eroding slope, and every nation appears to be “going to hell in a hand-basket” in the slide, not just us.
These aberrations – violent crimes, and particularly gun crimes; domestic abuse; alcohol abuse; blatant corruption; etc. – are on the rise everywhere, and I guarantee you that you will get very much the same picture from the newspaper in Jamaica, or Barbados, or St. Lucia or New York, or virtually any place where there is a substantial population and substantial development. Even in the tiny Cayman Islands, with a population of 55,000 people, it’s there. Everywhere you look – even in the idyllic out-islands of the Bahamas, where only a few people live – it’s there. Go to almost every nation on earth, focus on almost any decadent behavior, and ask the people there about it; they will tell you, “It’s getting worse every day.” Almost every place you visit, you hear a similar litany. “I don’t know what’s happening; this place has gone to the dogs.”
The point of my small ruse in using the Trinidad paper is to show that when we display alarm at the conditions of our country, we need to bear in mind that we are not alone with these sicknesses.
Of course, it goes without saying that we must be deeply concerned about these things and must make every effort to resolve them, but at the same time let us not subscribe to the common refrain that these aberrations prove what a particularly wretched people Guyanese have become. Mankind’s degradation of mankind is now the status quo; we are not alone in that.
Everywhere one looks, it is as if these ills are the result of some universal condition that has infected people in every corner of the earth. The condition is being seen these days even in small towns in the USA where the residents are in shock over some horrific murder, sometimes committed by invading robbers, but sometimes being propelled from within reputable families. Time and again, their law enforcement officers will say, “We’ve never had this kind of thing here; it’s unbelievable.” Indeed, in Guyana these days, the press sometimes reports a similar expression of disbelief from residents in our isolated hinterland communities hit by violent crime.
The times, as songwriter Bob Dylan put it, are indeed a-changing, and the mankind emerging from those changes is not a pretty sight. We are more violent, more drug-oriented, more thieving, more corrupt, more deluded, than ever. Worse yet, there seems to be no hope of our getting off the slope – each year the downward slide continues.
And ultimately, in this depressing picture that’s the most depressing aspect – that mankind everywhere is infected. In the richest countries in the world, with apparently the best brains and the best resources, the infection rages. Bad as it is, what we see here is part of a global frenzy that the world, with all its deemed advances, is unable to restrain.
The sociologist and the anthropologist will have to weigh in on the causative factors, but we don’t need the experts to tell us that the condition is real. Everywhere you look mankind is awash in guns and more are coming. (Six weeks ago I stood in a store in Maine staring at an array of guns including a deadly-looking repeater shotgun. The salesman told me, “All you need is a clean record; you could buy that and just walk out of here with it.” As I write this, an American “Miss Liberty” beauty contest, slated for 2012, will require contestants to be proficient in the use of firearms.)
Everywhere you look in this world public servants are being investigated for fraud; religious leaders are being accused of molesting youths in their charge; women are being beaten and sometimes murdered by men who are ostensibly their companions. Everywhere you look alcohol is being abused, leading to innocent people losing their lives, and every day we drink more.
In Guyana, we certainly have our share of egregious acts, but as we admit our shame at those things we must also contest the assertion, sometimes made regrettably by our own people, that these behaviours are singularly ours. Mankind everywhere is beset by this decay; it’s not unique to Guyana.
