Latest update May 8th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 25, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Listening to the radio yesterday, I heard a man call in to make his contribution to a programme about the craziest things that happened on Mash Day.
This particular caller said that he saw a garbage bag being thrown out of a moving vehicle. Amazingly, the bag ended up in another vehicle and quite tragically seemed to have hit a woman in that vehicle.
This story just goes to show how reckless and carefree Guyanese have become when it comes to garbage disposal. It was not bad enough for someone to throw their garbage out of a moving car.
It ended up in another car and possibly caused injury to an innocent person. The guilty party, according to the caller, realized what had happened and instead of stopping and apologizing and lending a helping hand, actually sped away.
There have been many comments about the unsightly state of the route after Sunday’s Mash Day events. After the bacchanal had ended, garbage was strewn all over.
The absence of an adequate number of bins is not an excuse for the mass littering that took place. People did not even bother to find a convenient spot to stockpile their litter. They simply dumped it wherever they were. Bottles were not just left along the edges of the road. In some cases they were broken, with the splinters lying on the roadway.
It is said that City Hall made a few millions of dollars by renting spots to vendors along the parade route. However, it will cost City Hall, quite a few millions to clean up the mountains to garbage left behind after the celebrations were over.
Some of the garbage has fallen in the canals that run along the streets of the parade route. This will entail additional cleaning.
By today everything should be spick and span. But there is a huge cost involved and a great lesson to be had about the habits of Guyanese.
We like to feel that government is the biggest problem we have. But we have not looked at ourselves long and close enough. Most of the problems that citizens expect the government to clean up are problems that could have been avoided if citizens were more responsible.
There was no need for so much garbage to be strewn all over the parade route. That is a result not of the lack of garbage receptacles but of a total disregard for the country. How can people claim to love this country when they litter with such impunity? Yet when they go overseas they do not behave in the same way. They go to a foreign country and they fall in line. The reason they fall in line is because they know that others will look down on them if they dare litter. They know that they will be reported and the penalties will be severe.
Fines are however not the ultimate solution to littering. In Guyana fines have a way of increasing corruption. At one time there used to be a member of the Constabulary of City Hall who would pounce on smokers who disposed of their cigarettes butts in the gutters. In most parts of the world, you do not dispose of the ends of your cigarettes into rubbish bins because it would cause a fire.
As such, smokers are in many cases allowed to defuse their cigarettes in certain ways. In Guyana, this particular constable considered that littering and would pounce on passersby who disposed of their butts in public.
He is no longer on the job and the reason why is not hard to appreciate. He was like a judge and jury at the same time.
What is needed is for a culture of good civic habits to be developed. People have to begin to learn to not litter, not pee on the roadways, not spit in public, to walk on the correct sides of the roadways and a host of other civic duties that seems to be fast disappearing in this country.
At one time, it was felt that those who littered represented a minority in the country. But after seeing the state of the parade route after Sunday’s Mash Day celebrations, that view has to be reconsidered.
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