The nightmare challenge that faces the Granger Government

JULY 26, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

One of the most deadly and dangerous things that threaten the soul of any nation is when a perversion is accepted as normal and it becomes the standard by which people judge each other and their country. Perhaps the most graphic example is the gun culture in the US. For the average US citizen, guns are to Americans what water is to a fish. It is not that Americans love violence and therefore they worship the gun. It is far more psychologically simple than that. Generations of Americans since the 18th century have been weaned on the gun culture. The possession and use of a gun is normal to them. Try telling a Brazilian that soccer is a foolish game. The reason men beat women throughout the centuries and people hurt homosexuals was because they grew up understanding that such practices were normal. Once a negative value etches its way into the psyche of a nation, it becomes the norm. It becomes the standard by which people live their lives and the standard by which they judge others. I had a passenger in my car who is a senior journalist and I stopped to let a car coming from a corner turn into the right-of-way. He urged me to drive and leave the guy to fend for himself. According to him it is every man for himself in Guyana. This is a friend of mine who is a decent man, but he was judging me by what was the norm in Guyana. Over the past fifty years, this country, because of its backward political culture and authoritarian governance, has lost its conscience. People in Guyana have lost their humanity, their sense of outrage at human suffering. This is a nation where at the emotional level, there is no connection and identification with the need to feel hurt at the hurt people feel when victimized, especially if the victims are the poor and powerless. Every day, including yesterday, I see wild horses roaming on the Railway Embankment. For years now these horses have resulted in deaths due to vehicular accidents. But no one is moved, and those horses will kill more people in many, many more years to come. I remember the days when my daughter was a student at Marian Academy. Her classmate was expelled for kissing a boy. I went to a group of parents and they just shrugged their shoulders. They just could not have been bothered. I approached the then head of the parent/teacher association who nonchalantly told me with a grin that the association exists in name only. I will always remember the face of that child’s grandmother. The look of helplessness and hopelessness. Children in the middle of their school term were expelled by Mae’s School after being found with cell-phones in their bags. Such an outrage against children would not be tolerated in any other country. The only place where that would not move people to anger is in a land where people have lost their soul. Such a county is Guyana. When I read a letter that the owners of a huge retail store on Water Street compels its employees to buy the toilet paper and hand detergent for use in the store’s washrooms, I thought we would see letters of indignation. This was a terrible policy by a super-rich, Guyanese family. Not even one letter of response appeared in the press or single comment on Facebook. No one in this entire country saw that act as a terrible, infamous manifestation of morbid greed. I am positive that in small Barbados that would have been a hot topic for the average talk-show host. I remember last year, a judge ordered probation for a drunk driver who killed four persons and injured two others. That sentence became an emotional topic in all the major networks across the entire territory of the United States. In Guyana, such an erratic sentence would have passed unnoticed (for details on this Google, “Ethan Couch”). This dead conscience permeates this entire country. The GRA charged a poor fellow who made a living holding an annual dance in Calcutta, Mahaicony. On the day in court, he ran out of the courtroom and jumped into the Mahaicony River where he drowned. No one in Guyana wrote about this injustice (see my September 2, 2010 column). A teenage girl is jailed for six months for leaving Guyana for Suriname through the speedboat route on the Corentyne River. No one denounced this tragedy (see my October 24, 2014 column.). The biggest danger facing the Granger Government is how his administration is going to steer Guyanese out of this deep-seated inhumanity.