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Quoting Tennessee Williams on Mash Day

Feb 23, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In one of his less successful plays but one that is my preferred choice, Tennessee Williams in “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” (made into the film titled “Boom” with Elizabeth Taylor) wrote that every step you take in the present, right there and then becomes the past. So in a fleeting moment, today’s excitement you feel in your enjoyment of Mashramani celebrations will become the past, and once again, living in and with Guyana becomes your reality.
It is for this reason, I suspect people engage in intense leisure in Guyana. They want to have fun and forget about the discomfort, pain and suffering that characterize existence in this land. This is a country where living is a burden unless you are spectacularly wealthy. Daily life is a hassle.
It occurred to me that I should retain the countless number of emails I get from people about the unpleasant things that happen to them and reproduce them in some columns. But they are simply too much. The latest one I received two days ago. I forwarded it to the publisher, Mr. Lall, the editor Adam Harris, his deputy Nigel McKenzie, and assistant editor, Leonard Gildarie.
The sender complained of constant harassment by the Essequibo traffic ranks. You can detect the desperation in his words. This is just one of thousands that I have received over the years. They make me angry and sad. When people have to endure these unbearable hassles, they could only cope by seeking relaxation and enjoyment. They want to take their minds off Guyana’s cruelties.
I too want to take my mind off of these emails I get, and the complaints I receive in person when I am with my dog or shopping or at the gas station, etc. They are really about very sad things that happen to people who cannot help themselves and they have no one to turn to. Readers can’t begin to imagine what the ordinary folks go through in this country.
Single mothers get robbed every month by private security firms and there is no one they can seek redress from. They are robbed of their overtime. They are unnecessarily penalized and money taken out of their salaries as a matter of routine. The most feared human in Guyana is a traffic cop. Traffic ranks in Guyana are the worst behaved in the entire Caribbean.
I am not impressed with the new Commissioner of Police. What has changed in the police force since he was appointed? When the incident between a traffic rank and Berbice attorney, Ryan Crawford made national headlines, because of the nature of the incident, one thought the cause of the unpleasant occurrence so heavily highlighted would disappear. It has not.
If you can recall, Crawford was stopped and he complained that the command was a random edict and the rank failed to disclose why he stopped him. A big quarrel ensued and Crawford was caught on tape using tempestuously abusive semantics. He was visited with several charges. I will not criticize the charges. The evidence against Crawford is the tape. But has the rank been disciplined? The police procedure is that random stopping is improper. So why did the rank do it?
Since the Crawford incident, I see routine stops almost daily on the street where I live – Railway Embankment next to the Caricom Secretariat. Drivers in Guyana live in fear of the traffic ranks. And has the behaviour of the latter abated since we got a new home affairs minister in 2015 and a new Police Commissioner in 2018?
Most state services are harsh and unsatisfactory and make people depress. Imagine, one has to get time from their boss to visit one of the following; GPL, GWI, NIS, a public or a private school, the deeds registry, a police station, the commercial banks, and the stress that person undergoes when they return to their workplace five hours after to face their boss . This is sadism. I know people who have literally cried over what the commercial banks put them through. There are horror stories of mistreatment of students and parents at private schools.
So, today, when you see thousands and thousands of persons in gay abandonment today (gay in the traditional sense of the word, meaning to be jolly and happy), it is not that they are obsessed with pleasure and nothing else matters. It is their way of forgetting that they live in a sadistic hell-hole.
I once did a solitary, brave, violent revolutionary act against the Burnham government when I was a young dreamer in the WPA. I’m sorry I am no longer an idealistic youth. I would have done it again in these times.

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