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No society like Guyana is worthy of existence
Jun 21, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I don’t believe there is a country in the world that tolerates and accepts the social abuse and humiliation that characterize Guyana. If we remain in this morbid state of affairs, then the next generation of this land will be the most sheepish nation on the face of the earth. The Guyanese people seem to be psychologically paralyzed to the point where children have no concept of what values are.
On a daily basis, people are treated to the most appalling indignities and this society remains unmoved. I remember I did two columns on the pain a mother went through when her daughter was peremptorily expelled from Mae’s High School over possession of a cell phone.
The mother told me she contacted two PNC parliamentarians, Clarissa Riehl and Deborah Backer, but they chose not to seek legal redress. The girl’s father, a chartered accountant in private practice, was a PNC election candidate in 1997.
The son of the owner of one of Guyana’s leading supermarkets was similarly expelled from Mae’s for the same offence, and the child was traumatized. One of the regrets I have in my human rights career was my lack of action when a student in my daughter’s class at Marian Academy was immediately expelled after she was found kissing a boy. Not one parent was willing to accompany me to the school to confront the administration. Not even the PTA was interested.
That child never recovered from the psychological devastation. She dropped out of St. Stanislaus that I got her into, then, became pregnant. I can assure Marian Academy and Mae’s (and this is a promise to both schools) if complaints of similar violations of children’s rights come my way, I will use my own money to secure legal assistance for the victims.
I went to Berbice Multilateral High School last week, where students have to pay $700 for one sheet of exam questions. Just one sheet cost $700. A ream of printing paper consisting of a thousand sheets is nine hundred dollars. This is a society that has a Rights of the Child Commission, and that disgraceful body has done nothing about a video on You Tube that shows a policeman beating a child and his mother at Marudi.
Equally disgraceful were the words that came out of the mouth of the Commissioner of Police when asked why the rank was not interdicted. He asked why; after all he didn’t kill anyone. Now there are photographs circulating of an Amerindian woman with blood on her face and swollen lips. She and her brother were beaten by a policeman in Rupununi.
This country has long forgotten the monstrosity that visited the relatives of three dead men who were shot in the July 2012 electricity hike protest in Linden. In two cases, three million dollars was awarded and in the other, two million dollars. Yet when some accused appear in front of a magistrate, bail is set at a million dollars.
These men’s lives were regarded as worthless, thus they didn’t deserve anything substantial. In this country life has no value. I wonder if political instability should occur and should spill over in the streets, how Guyanese would react to the loss of life. That is an interesting and intriguing curiosity.
Not a day passes without a sickening act of moral degradation in Guyana, and from mother to teacher to priest to opposition party to Minister of Government not a word of resentment is uttered. What is shocking in a global context is that per capita Guyana has more churches (including all the major religions) than any other country in the world. We have just under 800,000 souls, yet the most ubiquitous sight is a place of worship.
I was educated in life to think that religion is about the fighting of evil. When people can remain unconcerned about the domination of life by evil then that society is not worthy of existing.
Can the heartless things that happen to the Guyanese people occur in other nations and there would be no protest? I very much doubt it. What is the explanation? I can only attempt a non-specialist explanation. I have no training in psychology.
I believe that when a society goes through a long period of dictatorship where fear, tyranny, perpetual indignity, loss of pride, loss of hope and ubiquitous pessimism are the order of the day, then people lose their ability to judge negative and positive values. They lose the ability to distinguish between the normal and the bizarre. In other words, they lose the inner capacity to think like normal human beings.
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