A most disgusting letter

Jan 30, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
There are so many cowardly people in this small country, that no wonder so much ill has befallen us. We need to go back to the good old days when we were taught to call a spade, a spade.
We were taught to speak the truth cost it what it will. If we adopt that attitude, the powers that be will tremble. But instead, we all pander to one prejudiced viewpoint or the other.
I read a very wicked and slanderous letter in yesterday’s Chronicle (Happy Lethem Bandits Have Been Arrested—Chronicle Monday 28th Jan. 2013) that only served to sow more discord among residents. The letter was written by one Anthony Gilkes.
Now, I have been resident in the Rupununi since July 1991, and there simply is no such person in this Region. My friends also have never heard, nor have any knowledge of such a person. Therefore the obvious conclusion is a cowardly person, hiding in his/her cocoon of anonymity, penned such a letter.
That coward wrote, and I quote ‘But reliable information is that the bandits were staying at the Cacique Guest House located in a slum at Lethem.’
That is very objectionable, and I call on all right thinking residents of Lethem to condemn in the strongest terms possible, the classification of any community in this Region as a slum. Since we cannot identify the author of the letter, although we all have a very good idea where it emanated from, the residents should direct their objections to the Chronicle via a class suit.
The author, in an attempt to smear the character of an entire community, has only served to exhibit his/her intellectual deficiencies. Had the author done his/her research, he would have known that a slum is a squalid street, or part of a town characterized by overcrowding, dilapidation, poverty, vice and dirt. Squalid is dirty especially through neglect. It also means filthy and foul.
Driving along the road that the named hotel is on, one of the first roads in Lethem, and also one of the busiest, one will observe that it is still made of laterite, while roads in surrounding areas are all paved.
I want to submit that that is not by accident; rather, it is by design. That particular area is inhabited by residents who do not support the government and as such, like other similar communities, it is being punished. Because the powers that be cannot have their own way, they are referred to as the Ghetto. That is the criminalizing of communities that I wrote about in one of my previous letter.
For the writer to refer to this area as a slum, that person’s mind has to be slummish. There is a saying “if you want to keep me in the gutter, you have to be there with me to ensure that I stay in the gutter.” So the author is forever in a slum.
There are other things mentioned in the letter that the police, the hotel owners and another named individual have to deal with on their own. But, I register my strong objection to this area being called a slum and call on the discredited Chronicle to carry an unequivocal apology to the residents of this neighbourhood in particular, and to all Rupununians in general. That area is no slum.
Carl A. Parker

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