Coconut shells and Movie Towne: This miserable country

Jul 24, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On Monday morning at 1:00 am, three cars were testing out their engines in the parking lot of Movie Towne complex. Three cars were going round in circles with their engines making noise that could have been heard miles away. This went on for one hour.
These drivers didn’t perform their asininity where they live but where other persons dwell and at an hour where residents were sleeping. It is quite clear to the Guyanese people that the parking lot of Movie Towne complex is becoming a Faustian playground where evil grows and glows.
Last month GTT had a Caribbean concert there where the sound went way beyond UG into Sophia (see my two columns -Wednesday, July 3, 2019, “GTT, Movie Towne, the police and shit-hole Guyana and Friday, July 5, 2019, “Nastiness spreads like wild fire in this country.”
I don’t know if it is poetic justice but on Monday evening, the sewage system of the complex was in a terrible state with sewage water flowing on the western side of the same car park.
On Sunday night, I drove into the car park with my dog, and the scent was odious. So I looked around and there I saw it- the western car park was flooded not with rain water from the day’s powerful showers but filthy water. Even the gods are against the Guyanese people.
The sewage infrastructure malfunctioned after the philistinism of the GTT and the uncivilized drivers. Why not before?
The uncivilized drivers are part of the Guyanese society. But so much in and of this country is uncivilized. But the uncivilized dimension is not the only part of Guyana’s defective metabolism. It is the Dostoevskian silence and fatalistic resignation among its citizens. The US is the graphic opposite of Guyana.
I told my wife that the US is becoming a frightening place but the culture that Trump ushered in will soon be defeated because the US is full of brave people that will not let that kind of culture overtake their country. Where are the brave souls in Guyana? Take away the UG unions and there is no civil society in this land.
I read that one of Guyana’s richest families was fined a million dollars for throwing coconut shells, the waste product from its coconut industry, in the tributary of one of the country’s main rivers. I read that item with overflowing cynicism.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the perversity was going on for years and the family was warned. According to the EPA, 15,000 shells were dumped into the canals that flow into the Pomeroon River.
In a country where flooding comes easily and where that river is a main resource for the people in that region, such cruelty had to be interpreted by the EPA as a disastrous act of irresponsibility. But apparently not! The wealthy family was visited with a mere million dollar fine.
Dr. Vince Adams, the head of the EPA, lived in the United States all his adult life. He knows that if a company was found guilty of such a violation that company would have been assigned a huge fine. On a deleterious environmental situation like that affecting the Pomeroon River, a stupendously wealthy family was given a mere million dollar fine.
If it was a bicycle repair man that was throwing his old tubes into that very river, his business would have been closed down. It goes back to the theme of my last Sunday column where I argued that in countries with small populations, the wealthy class virtually owns the government, the security forces, the law people, and the society in total.
One must not forget that we are in the election season where big companies automatically become the untouchables. They give money to the politicians like when grass springs up in the rainy season. This is the time when the party leaders line up outside the offices of the wealthy folks to collect their campaign perks.
The losers of course are the little fools who spend the entire campaign season climbing up electricity poles to nail up party flags and perambulating the streets of Guyana in torrid heat to share out campaign leaflets.
After victory is clinched, they go to the party office for employment only to be asked how many qualifications they have. If they said none, they are given money to buy a Chinese fried rice and told to come back in six months’ time.
I have witnessed that with my own two eyes after the 2015 election results.

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Coconut shells and Movie Towne: This miserable country

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