The season of madness is coming

Nov 07, 2010 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

Christmas is around the corner, and with it will come the frenetic activities of cleaning and painting and of course, shopping. People tend to go mad at this time of the year. It is as if they have been waiting the entire year for this. But before they get to Christmas there are so many things that they must first enjoy, or at least tolerate.
The past two days there was Diwali with all the lights and sweetmeats. This is a most glorious event and anyone living in Guyana cannot but help being caught up in the festivities. On Thursday, thousands lined the Georgetown Seawall in the vicinity of Sheriff Street to get a glimpse of the motorcade.
For years this motorcade has been the highlight of the Diwali celebrations in the city and it keeps drawing people from miles around. In more recent times it has brought with it the explosives that were once reserved for Christmas. Manning the explosives were a batch of irresponsible individuals who kept tossing them at people.
Someone in Berbice tossed one explosive too many and set a house on fire. The occupants are going to blame Diwali rather than the irresponsible person.
Unlike years gone by when they were mostly harmless squibs and people had to resort to other devices to get larger explosions, these are literally sticks of dynamite capable of untold harm. But those hurling them thought it funny when they tossed them in crowds and watched as people got hurt.
Diwali also brought with it an opportunity for violence. A group of young men decided that the motorcade was irrelevant and that they needed to shed blood. A young man got a knife in his neck and died. It is here that I had to take a break and allow past memories to come flooding back.
When I was a boy and my mother wanted to beat me I hid under the bed. I recalled thunder and lightning sending some of my siblings under the same bed. Under the bed was a sanctuary for the very young and the very scared. I am not sure why people choose there to hide.
I have known adults diving under the bed to escape bandit attacks and on a few occasions when fire threatened, children have been known to dive under beds. A few died there.
Two killers found under the bed a safe place. After they had knifed the young man on the seawall they ran home to hide. Subsequent reports were that the police went to the home and without using too much intelligence, looked under the bed for one of the killers and in a closet for the other.
I am a parent and I could imagine how I would have felt if the police had cause to come to my home to arrest my children. Knock wood, this never happened because I taught my children to walk away from volatile situations.
Times have changed when boys settled scores with their fists and when the onlookers parted them when they thought that one combatant was getting the worse.
But the explosions were the other worrying factors. On a few occasions I nearly jumped out of my skin when an extremely large squib exploded in the neighbourhood. Some sounded like gunshots and created quite a few terrors for those who happen to live where gunshots were the order of the day.
There are going to be other events when the explosive devices will come out in force. Christmas is one of them. Like Diwali, there would be the lights. But there would be more. Unlike Diwali when the focus would be on the sweetmeats, Christmas brings with it all the meats one can think about. It will also bring madness.
I was at the police presentation of plans for the vacation and they confirmed that there will be madness at this time of the year. For one, they expect armed criminals. As I remarked earlier, people will fork out cash from every nook and cranny. They will then take to the streets to visit the shopping centres hunting bargains because none of them is rich enough to just walk into any store and buy at any price.
While they go bargain hunting there will be people looking to hunt them because they too want a bright Christmas. Of course, the obvious suggestion would be for these people to find a job, but it would seem that work is an anathema to some people, especially when they failed to grasp a basic education.
In an earlier column, I expressed the fear that our schools were putting out too many illiterates and that the society would have to pay. If we are to check the academic levels of those caught up in crime we would find that most of them cannot read or write. The inability to read and write leads to the inability to reason. The offshoot is that people arrested for a crime are often arrested for similar crimes not long after they are granted bail.
But for all the anticipated confusion I look forward to this season because I get a chance sit back and watch children become children and women become sharks.
I expect to be cussed, but past experience and evidence has led me to believe that women are going to be out in their numbers looking for that bit extra.
It is also the period when men hide because they know that they are expected to pay up for services and benefits they enjoyed all year round. This is a good time of the year.

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