Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:43 AM
Oct 10, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev
Some memories stay with you. I can still recollect every detail of the “sit-ins” of 1963 at my primary school which eventually led to three segregated schools in the village. And a village that has never been put together again. The Kaieteur News front page revealing Neesa as the “headless” female that had been dumped in a suitcase, will be another such a memory for me. “I know this child”, was my stunned reaction.
Neesa had been in the same sixth grade class at Leonora Primary as my daughter, Anu. Placing 10th in the SSEE, she had to be not only bright but very disciplined. Picking up my kids sometimes, I would see her trudging to her home, which was just around the corner from the school, pulling along her load of books. She always wore a keemar – the muslim scarf that covered her hair – as did the mother on the few occasions I saw her. The father, neatly bearded, appeared very reserved. With their road-side concrete verandahed house, car in the driveway and holidays abroad, they were typical of the rural middle class. I remember seeing both parents on the day of enrolment at Queen’s College and thinking what a nice, observant, Muslim family they were.
Barry Small and his wife moved into the house next to the ROAR office in Leonora soon after they were married, where he soon established a gym and raised pit bulls. I once discussed the purchasing of a pup with him, but decided that I wasn’t the pit bull kind of fella. His father-in-law, who I believe bought the house, is a very religious schoolteacher that ran the most popular and wildly successful accounts lessons for decades on West Coast. He has been a friend since high school. We are talking about solid, middle-class people.
Their lifestyle is what most of the poor – meaning the majority of Guyanese – aspire to and all our “development” plans are geared to deliver. The sordid tale around Neesa that is still unfolding should make us take pause because all of us know that she is merely the dénouement of the degradation that has come to typify Guyanese life since the seventies.
Whoever bludgeoned Neesa’s head beyond recognition as even a head, is not in any way more disrespectful of life than the person who dropped the corpse of Monica Reece on Main Street so many years ago. The party that she evidently attended and the vehicle that dropped her off, both had the middle-class cachet to which we all aspire. And wasn’t this a resonance of the dancer Dolly Baksh – hacked to death and dumped in similar circumstances decades before?
After our economy disintegrated, many excused our steady descent into immorality and vice on the strained circumstances in which most were forced to exist – or subsist. Maybe. But I believe we suffered not just a disintegration of our material wealth but more fundamentally, a callusing of our moral fibre. Yet we clamour for the wealth and spare not a thought for our moral decline. The acquisition of that wealth without the repair of our morality compass has fuelled the worst impulses of our unrestrained desires.
It has not helped that the economism of the Marxists has been unreservedly accepted by the neo-liberal model that we have so eagerly accepted. It is as if Adam Smith never cautioned that the free market had to be situated within a moral order. We have been inundated by the media of the west with its moral relativity and crass materialism: money is the measure of all things. Anything goes and the more of it the better. This attitude of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost is now the dominant norm in Guyana.
There’s a story I heard some years ago from a sermon by Moen Hack from the CIOG. A ship was sailing to its destination with passengers on and below decks. The ones above were very moral and learned and lived very righteous lives. The ones below, however, were very dissolute and for reasons best known to themselves began to tunnel into the side of the ship. We all know how that story ended.
The moral, of course, is that we are all literally in the same boat and we will sink or swim together. Our obsessive focus on personal wealth, however, subverts that lesson. Bereft of any social conscience, it guarantees the moral depravity that defines us today. Those who know better have to work among the less aware to let them appreciate that truth. But they will only listen if our message is not seen as a ruse to entrench inequalities and injustices. A viable society ultimately has to be a moral community in which leaders are the moral exemplars. (To be continued)
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
Apr 24, 2024
Round 2 GFF Women’s League Division One Kaieteur Sports – The Guyana Police Force FC on Saturday last demolished Pakuri Jaguars FC with a 17 – 0 goal blitz at the Guyana Football...Kaieteur News – Just recently, the PPC determined that it does not have the authority to vitiate a contract which was... more
By Sir Ronald Sanders Waterfalls Magazine – On April 10, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States... more
Freedom of speech is our core value at Kaieteur News. If the letter/e-mail you sent was not published, and you believe that its contents were not libellous, let us know, please contact us by phone or email.
Feel free to send us your comments and/or criticisms.
Contact: 624-6456; 225-8452; 225-8458; 225-8463; 225-8465; 225-8473 or 225-8491.
Or by Email: [email protected] / [email protected]