Next year I plan to smash, not mash

Feb 28, 2013 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Selflessness is under assault. Across Guyana there is a rise in selfish, inconsiderate even truculent behaviour.
Nowhere is it more noticeable and felt than on the roads of Georgetown.
On Mash Day a friend kindly allowed me to park my vehicle on her bridge in Eping Avenue, Bel Air Park to avoid any cars from parking to block her entrance as happens every year at Mash time. So advised, so done.
However, by the time I was ready to leave two cars had double parked to my right blocking any passage in the road at that point. After an abortive three-hour wait I was forced to abandon my car and take a taxi home.
Finding a taxi was another herculean task but eventually I did. Obviously the two selfish drivers had left their cars almost in the centre of Eping Avenue about 100 yards from Vlissengen Road and joined the revelers. It was a boorish act they would never have tried in New York or London. Had they done so, both cars would have been removed by tow trucks to a distant car pound, they would have been fined or had their vehicles clamped. Retrieving them would have cost each driver dearly.
What bothered me most was the warped thought process that had gone in to this amazing self-centred, uncaring act.
Both drivers had to know that they would be blocking traffic at that Western end of Eping Avenue until 2am or later Sunday morning. I doubt they arrived there drunk or drugged so their act was deliberate and churlish to an extreme, even hostile.
The new aggressive society and too much exposure to self-serving political relations, it seems, are part of the process of dehumanizing Guyanese, weakening bonds of kinship and care and bringing less thoughtfulness. The point of selflessness is that it is specific to the parties to the relationship as parking partners in Eping Avenue and should not be arbitrarily dissipated and devalued. Its very value is the glue that binds society together and produces clusters of caring citizens. Had I been trying to evacuate a sick or dying relative from the house where I was, I would have removed those two cars by brute force in a fit of ignorance matching that of the double parkers.
What pains me most is that these two double parkers were relying on the civilized behaviour of the community of fellow parkers and counting on them not to descend into primitiveness or impulsive behaviour mimicking their own.
They won this time and should be happy their Mash 2013 was peaceful and inexpensive. However, next year Mash I’m going Mediaeval. In the words of a popular seventies carnival road march calypso “I walk wid meh rope”. I will also carry a sledge hammer in my car as I plan to smash, not mash!
F. Hamley Case

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Next year I plan to smash, not mash

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