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Is Mark Benschop seeking publicity?

Dec 19, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When you dare to be different and stand up for what you believe in, you can be assured as night follows day, as day follows night, there will be ugly things said about you. Those who cannot understand the human mind and the passion and purpose that drive it, those who cannot understand the moral depths that lie in other human beings, will laugh at you, will deride you.
I wasn’t surprised when I read in a Stabroek News editorial that the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange has been put down by that newspaper as a seeker of publicity. For a majority of people around the world, Julian Assange is a hero
I have heard people say that Mark Benschop is searching for publicity. They say this because he is the only one that goes with his placard here and there. They deride him because he is the only one that mounted his protest in front of some building that symbolizes naked power.
Some will mock him because he held a one-man campaign to close the stink Le Repentir dump site, perhaps the place where the miasma came from that powerful people threw in my face last May.
I get angry, at times uncontrollably angry, when I hear people say that Benschop wants to be noticed. They utter this foolishness because they want Benschop to wait for a few hundreds of frightened, terrified citizens to join him and if they don’t then Benschop shouldn’t be out there.
If there is any human being on Planet Earth that can understand why Mark Benschop goes out there alone, it is Frederick Kissoon. I have been alone, a conspicuous solitary figure, protesting the evil that has overtaken this country for a long time now.
When they write the history of UG, they will call me the Mark Benschop of that place. For twenty-five years, I have stood virtually all by myself without others and have spoken out against the deliberate ruin of that institution. In a place where there are more than three hundred lecturers, no one voices even a whisper. I would be lying in the most barefaced way if I deny that over those twenty-five years, I haven’t become tired of being a one-man band at UG. There are times at UG I just couldn’t muster the energy, the optimism to speak another protest-word, because I was tired of my own solitary voice.
I stay on this page of this newspaper, and I hope, yes I hope, that with each passing day that I would be followed by others after the most horrific exposures I carry in my commentaries. But I look at tomorrow and there is no one there. And I carry on. I will carry on and I don’t give a damn if I am referred to as a one-man act.
I was burdened with pessimism when I met an eleven-year-old girl and her mother coming out of Medicare pharmacy on New Market Street. The mother told me that her daughter was depressed and wasn’t eating. She was peremptorily expelled from Mae’s School for possession of a cell phone.
Investigations revealed that five children suffered a similar fate over a ten-month period. I ran a column on this tragedy, and not one I repeat with emphasis, not ONE citizen of this country joined me. It was incredible silence that I am bold enough to say would not happen in any other country in the world.
I can deeply empathize with Mark Benschop because I have been there. I am still there. No one went with Benschop. Not even me, even though Benschop asked me to accompany him. I chose not to give him solidarity on that day because when he contacted me he outlined the form of the protest outside the dumpsite. I did not agree with it at the time.
I told him in no uncertain terms that I was unhappy with that form. He didn’t back down and I chose not to participate. It was only later that I found out that he didn’t pursue his original intention. In fairness to me I should share this with readers lest I be accused of not being there with him.
I will choose not to print the original form of protest that Benschop put to me. I will only do so if Benschop approves.
I endorse, here and now, Mark Benschop’s one-man demonstration outside that dumpsite.
There must never be a citizen of this country that should accuse him of being a loose cannon, a pursuer of attention because he is the only one in the picket line.
The people we should criticize are those who stand by and watch as their country slides into primitive civilization.

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