TWISTED VALUES AND PERCEPTIONS

Jul 13, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In my days before I started fathering children and even after, I visited restaurants, nightclubs or just took walks with my lady or to the Cinema, which is now returning and was a popular rendezvous, [There was also an entertainment spot by the same name].
As young men we considered hard liquor as an old man’s thing that went with a certain kind of Rum shop music.  I was almost forty when I drank Vodka, ‘Gin’, when my buddy Prince became an NCO.
Parties ended at twelve O’ Clock and there was time for other dating stuff. I’m talking the 1970’s and 80’s. Back then you had to know how to dance, I mean waltz, not only fine wine or later, backball. Remember guys like Shaft, Sailor, Pop-a-long and others and those dance exhibitions and competitions at Talk-of-The-Town, which started in the afternoon.
No, there was no youth sitting at a table drinking to helplessness and popping pills in sloppy decadence, confident in stupidity; you had to reach to work at 7 or 8am remember? I’ve had this conversation with my elder children, especially my son. I was not a sheltered youth; things went wrong with management and I was on my own pretty early. Thank God for the support systems of the PNC during the early seventies—GYC, Pioneer Corps, and there was a stable value system of things you didn’t do.
There were no Saints in those days, just that the wildness was contained. There were fellows like ‘Jesus’ selling stuff back then, pills and other substances that  we considered Hippie foolishness.  I was in school during that POP- A-LONG, Durban Park craze; I didn’t feel that it was good for my faculties and manhood. I had a school mate up the Coast, named Nicky, It messed up his entire life, so I didn’t touch it.
I support the return of the 2 am cut-off point implemented by the Minister of Public Security. Specific out of control Night spots made this necessary. But from the letters and social media comments, there’s need for an Alcohol Boot Camp, I am not joking. Then Clement Rohee is attempting to play Politics, saying that the 2am cut off is “not Guyanese”.  Where was this Guy when we were living the above?
He’s older than I am. Did he miss that entire teenage and early adult experience?  Ask the owner of The ‘Gravity Club’, she’ll tell you that I’m not saying anything but the truth.
The pathetic argument against the resumption to what was ordinary 25 years ago is that no one has taken count of the accidents, many fatal, that have occurred in the early hours of the morning, assigned to drunkenness, nor the amount of whimsical murders that have happened at some prominent Nightspots over the last 10-15 years, corrosive liquids thrown into the face of a citizen asking an unreasonable open night spot to tone down the music, night after night.
There was a guy who used to hang by Light and Robb Street corner, not sure what his business was, however one night the son of what they call  ‘A Big Man’, after a binge at a Night spot, ‘felt like shooting somebody”. As an occupant related, he drove past and shot this fellow in the head.
The victim didn’t die, but it surely affected him because the ‘Money Man’ got a Lawyer to offer him a settlement of $1M, and that was it. How many fatal and unexplained accidents are the results of sleep deprivation, hangovers or some other stuff in the blood stream? Remember, Drunken Minister of Government beats man with Gun, knocks down Policeman. Have we forgotten a few months ago another drunken Minister in an accident?
Come on people, fight the mental dehydration of too much liquor and self destruction. I have friends who own bars, one concluded that his customers are coming earlier, but he’s able to get some early sleep.
The son of a Rum shop owner once told me “I don’t want to inherit this business as it is, I’ll turn it to an off licence store”, because he had lamented about a particular group of drinkers who would alone sit in the shop with a quarter only asking for Ice until his father could escape with the then cut off time and they would grumblingly (be thrown out) leave.
In my letters over the past years I’ve always lamented the destruction of our value system by the previous administration, especially its last 15 years; ‘Do as yuh like, once yuh wid we’.   Didn’t the son of a Jagdeo untouchable over the river hit a policeman with his gun, and it was cool?  I’ve seen fools, who I know can’t get a gun licence, shooting up in the air with 9MM weapons after a party.
The next official step should be an exploration of whom and how licence fire arms were administered over the last 15 years.  Should I Party, I’ll do like before, be there early, why should I want to wallow in alcohol till the sun rises.  I however do recommend ‘ Substance Abuse Boot camp’,  somewhere in the North west of Guyana, the beauty of that part of the country will sober up anyone.
Barrington Braithwaite

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