Nihilistic and dysfunctional: A nation breaks down

Nov 28, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

All over the world, even in the mega rich USA, people will take valuable from crime scenes. I remember in the US, a Wells Cargo armoured carrier crashed and money spilt out. People rushed onto the scene and carried it away.
I believe in many rich islands, some citizens would steal from a crashed airplane. One doesn’t expect that firemen that went to the disaster to save lives would steal from the victims. That is hardly likely to happen in the real world. Name a country where that diseased action would happen and if you know Guyana, it will head your list. Something eerie, inexplicable, irrational has taken over this land.
My theory is after the exodus and demise of the post fifty/sixty generation because of the zero sum battle between Burnham and Rodney in the year 1980, that post 1980 generation is a soulless nation that has no clue whatsoever what life, justice, sympathy, empathy, courage, love, and philosophical values are.
The post fifty/sixty generation embodied these priceless instincts. That era and its people are gone. Guyana since 1980 hardly exists.
From firemen exhibiting inhuman attitudes toward plane crash victims by stealing from helpless humans who thought they came to rescue them, we have policemen being accused of pilfering model planes from last week’s aviation convention. Now mind you – not the coffee lady, not the gardener from the Arthur Chung Centre where the conference was held, but the police who were there to preserve law and order.
Do these things surprise you? Only if you do not live in Guyana. I am not a middle class man who has no contact with life in and around Guyana. On the contrary, the opposite obtains. On Monday morning, I was walking on the beach with my dog and because it rained early that morning, the beach was wet. I felt a strange sensation under my feet. It was getting wet. The bottom of my right side shoe fell off. I went immediately to the cobbler group that operates on the pavement outside Bourda Market on Bourda Street. I am a regular visitor to these guys whose conversations are always interesting.
The guy said it is better to stitch both shoes and it will take 20 minutes. To kill the time, I went into a popular nearby supermarket. I took my items and went to the empty cashier. She said she is tending to a customer who has gone back to the shelves. The only other cashier had a line of Cuban purchasers. I figured the customer would take literally seconds so I will wait.
I have done the same thing umpteen times – you reach the cashier and you rush back to the shelves very quickly to pick up an item you forgot.
Four of us keep waiting. Guess what happened. The customer she was attending to went back to the selves do more shopping and she had us waiting. I voiced my strong disapproval. She went to the supervisor who came and cleared from the computerized cash register, the purchase from the original customer so others in line could be served.
I told her to her face, this could only happen in Guyana. I believe in my heart only in Guyana, would a supermarket cashier keep a line waiting while another customer goes searching for more stuff.
It was so unbelievable that it was the first thing I greeted my wife with when I went home. The fault is not confined to that young lady. It is a psychic breakdown in the post 1980 generation in Guyana. If I was to pick out examples of the nihilistic and dysfunctional nature of this land as a media practitioner and citizen, they would literally run into the thousands. Two stand out in my mind.
It is hard to believe that the two examples I will list below are routine stuff you find in other countries. In 2016, the Ministry of Public Infrastructure created exasperating traffic confusion by painting road signs on the very first day school reopened in the month of September.
What happened in July and August when traffic was lighter? (See my column of Wednesday, September 7, 16, titled, “Guyana: Beyond the incredibility of absurdity.”).
In 2016, owners of puppies at the Correia Airport at Ogle who couldn’t produce proof of where their dogs came from had the dogs killed right there and then. This went on for two weeks. See my columns of December 14 and December 16, 2016. In any other normal civilized, country, airport officials would have stolen the puppies for themselves. They killed them in Guyana. Only this newspaper showed sympathy and empathy. Do people live here?

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