Dear Editor,
There is so much to detest about how life has deteriorated in general. It has become increasingly difficult to hit the power button on the computer to move the day along, later to open a physical newspaper. A man on his way home attacked, robbed, and killed. Heinous and grievous as that is, it is compounded by the age of two of the alleged killers. One is 14, the other 15; the third alleged murderer is all of 19 years old. Four families in four different communities now damaged irreparably by one long, premeditated moment of madness that led to a murder. A dead husband, or father, or a brother, but definitely a son killed, as he was heading home to the now grimly, but so aptly, named Martyr’s Village, East Coast Demerara. One more fallen, three more heading to another graveyard, in one form or another.
I have been absorbing the news from a more civilised (supposedly) America, what goes on in classrooms and outside of schoolyards, and mostly involving young children, many of them very young children; then reading the newness of teen robberies and felonies. When would it stop? When would it start to make an appearance here? If the report of those ages are right, then that start has made its way here. A death in this manner must rank among the most inexplicable of deaths. Perhaps, it is an inevitable step from school violence to street violence. There is the violence of words, the impatience of words loaded with viral malevolence.
I speak not of the menace in some alleyway or some street corner or some village head in some ghetto area, but the violence of those from highly placed men, women of high hauteur. There is also violence in the homes abandoned, where the overseers are marooned or preoccupied, and how those vacuums are filled. If I may inquire: what are 14 and year olds doing outside of the house in the deepening hours of the dark? The family of a man cut down before he is 50, I am sure, will ask such a question, and still find any answer given unfathomable.
It seems that the demands of life have eroded those groundings of discipline, vigilance, and the nurturing that comes from both. It is only two teenagers, and a third older one, but swing right and swing left, raise eyes up and then cast them down, and there are these storms that lash us. The government watches citizens closely, is itself fearful of a few. If the powers of the State are this anxious, then what does that say? Citizens on the wrong side of events (events, not the law or morals, or ethics, or standards) study the government and ponder the latent violence of its more lightning-struck powerhouses. Economics has its trickledown concept; in politics, the local variety, it is the thunder of a violent, criminal cascade. Parents are neither hermits nor untouched. They are impassioned and simmering and resentful, and this is not the monopoly of one or two segments in Guyana’s demographic.
Children learn at the knee, and their ear can be keener than is thought. The shortages in the home, and the stresses that result release in an outpouring of verbal or physical violence. Sooner or later, in some instances, some quantity of that wends its way into the streams of life. A worker, a vulnerable shopper, or an unsuspecting traveller; someone dreaming of the comforts of home no matter how threadbare it may be, after a hard and frustrating day. Except the dream dies, and so does the dreamer, making it the last one that ever happens.
There is this onslaught of riches that is so elusive for too many. There are these assaults on the body that pierce and numb the consciousness, but visit so many. I was about to pen that the conscience of this nation ravaged by the pulsating underwater energy of a prized commodity, then thought better of it. To have a conscience in this country is to commit a crime. A capital one. Examine the consequences of boldness. Look at our state of existence, wise precautions all, for those who still have a dime or two left after dealing with the horror of the cost of living. Barred homes. Grilled businesses. Electronic eyes. Four-legged best friends. Fences ringed with steel possessing jagged edges. Taken together, they are too often not enough.
To digress momentarily, the fencing I referred to is not of the type that could protect the citizens of this country from becoming the victims of a different sort of rapacious predation. It is not just Guyanese maiming and murdering Guyanese, with those at the top and in charge deploying their own sophisticated weapons, and with the heart of identically lethal assassins. Strangers see openings. They maximise. Two young men, one older perp, and one man almost the sum of their ages. He didn’t make it to Martyr’s Village. What kind of monsters will we make of the first one, then the younger two? What strain of monsters have we become when we fear to speak of these things?
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
