Dear Editor,
Like many conservatives, Mr Keith Williams (‘Every civilized society has laws regulating hours for the sale of alcohol’ SN, July 7), perhaps a teetotaller, equates the availability of rights with his acceptance of the conduct being asserted. Since he doesn’t seem to think people should stay out late at nights and drink if they want to, he says that whether something is a right depends “on what rights supposedly are perceived to be infringed upon, and how important the circumstances are for maintaining order in the particular context.”
But who is to determine that? Should he? Should the government? Should the persons who want to drink and lime and dance until they feel like going home? Should the owners of businesses who have expended money, made plans and hired staff on the basis of an expectation which has been fostered? I suppose it could be perceived (to use Mr Williams’s superfluity) that each one of those would have a different answer as to what and how important their rights were.
Effectively balancing competing rights and interests, giving priority to rights over policies, is how I think governing (or adjudication in its absence) is supposed to work. But this is not a matter that can be resolved in the letter columns of a newspaper. I did not write an ode to drinking. My intention (SN, July 5) was to show that the unilateral enforcement of antiquated laws without any consultation whatsoever could possibly and unnecessarily affect the rights and wishes of people living in, working in and visiting Guyana.
Bars and nightclubs are not the only places where people can drink. A bottle of high wine drunk alone at home, without regard to closing hours, is probably far cheaper and more effective (if your intention is to get blind drunk) than a round of drinks in Palm Court. People also use syringes to inject themselves with drugs. Maybe Mr Williams believes that applying resources to regulate buying syringes is going to reduce drug related issues. Perhaps civilized countries have such laws.
Bars and nightclubs are social places. People go there to meet friends, to scope out other girls and boys, to hear music, to dance, to chat, to talk business in an informal setting, to sing karaoke, to show their relatives from overseas what a proper party is, to see what’s going on. If they want to stay out until dayclean and their parents and spouses don’t mind, why should Mr Williams’s sleep be bothered? Drinking oneself into oblivion, which seems to be anathema to Mr Williams, is not necessarily the primary purpose of going out on a weekend.
The fact that many places have last call laws does not mean that such laws are right, constitutional or effective. It simply means that people who follow Mr Williams’s point of view are lawmakers in those places. In that regard, I’m sure that Mr Williams did not mean to say that countries like Japan, China, Australia and Iceland were uncivilized. Every weekend in Iceland, whose population is similar in number to Georgetown’s, people party (and drink) until dawn. There is very little crime there. Near Bridgetown I’ve never seen St Lawrence Gap empty, nor St James in Port of Spain, and those are only the places named after saints.
Governing well is not a matter of simply passing orders down to be obeyed without question because they came from above or because those who are passing the orders feel they are right. How things affect people and what consequences really come from what actions are also of a little importance. But unilateral decisions made without consultation unfortunately do not take such trivial things into consideration.
Yours faithfully,
Kamal Ramkarran
