The USA and Guyana: Psychic breakdown

Jul 30, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – The population of India and China each has a billion more people than the US. Countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Nigeria have numbers close to the US. But the sociological aberrations and amazing consistency of physical violence that take place in the USA do not occur in those countries.
The US is the richest country in the world with a high level of democratic functionalism but yet its sociology is extremely worrying to the world. Whether an Asian, gay, Black or Hispanic person from any political party becomes the next US president, the psychological deformities that are so prevalent in American society will certainly not disappear. The American society has disturbing problems and that adjective is a mild one.
What I am writing here about the US is mediocre stuff compared to the brilliant books by brilliant minds that analyse the deep psychic conflicts that has engulfed the American population. A simple Google search will guide you to the literature.
I believe there isn’t any methodology you can use to compare the US and Guyana. That is a scholarly impossibility. But the one strand that stands out for me between the two countries is psychic breakdown.
I believe there is collective psychic problem in Guyana and it shapes this society in unpleasant, uncaring and pessimistic ways. The difference with Guyana and the US is that the US is an extremely rich, resourceful land. The wealth in the US society is so prodigious that it has the resources to employ people to attend to you when you enter a public institution.
Take security. Once you zigzag in the US on the roadway, the traffic cop will stop you. They are everywhere. You zigzag in Guyana and a pedestrian or a cyclist will get killed and the victim could have been saved if a traffic rank had detected the misbehaviour before.
In the US, despite its psychic breakdown, citizens get service. The American society is older and richer and things have fallen into place. The mentality of American people is determined by modern thinking. Our psychic laceration runs deeper than Americans’.
No legislator in the American society would be so crazy to announce that only five types of professions can sign a pension form. No American legislator would stay silent if one of their constituencies told them that as a woman, she was turned away from getting service from a public institution because her dress was sleeveless.
In Guyana, like in the US, the psychic collapse is not a fault of the politicians. Politicians from the PPP, PNC, AFC, WPA, who held power have come and gone and the frightening sociological deformities continue. I don’t blame the politicians only for the psychological mess this country has been in the past 45 years.
Guyanese politicians cannot be blamed for the way motorists drive in Guyana. In a small, obscure land with a tiny driving population, this country has the worst drivers in the world. One of the big differences between distraught American society and disturbed Guyanese society is that a frightening degeneracy will affect just an infinitesimal number in the US while in Guyana, a substantial number of the population is impacted.
Two examples should suffice. If you are a teenager in the US, living in New York and that State says to post a parcel to Alaska, you must show proof of address, then if you never receive a mail, you have a problem. But that teen can travel to a nearby State that does not have that restriction. This is because the US is a federal country with each state having its own laws.
In Guyana, the general post office in downtown Georgetown serves the population of the capital and its extension, which is about 100,000 persons. If a teenager is sending a parcel to her mother in the interior and she’s got no proof of address, she can’t send it.
The second example is a social disease that is expanding. Each Sunday night, about 50 motorcyclists start out from Movie Towne’s sprawling car park with their exhaust modified to make loud noise. They go east on both highways disturbing thousands and thousands and thousands of schoolchildren studying, old, sickly people sleeping and hard working citizens who have to work the next day. Why this would not happen in the US?
The motorcyclists in the US have large spaces where people do not live to do their stunts. In Guyana, they do it in the heart of communities. Remember GTT was given permission by Movie Towne to hold a Caribbean music show right in the heart of Liliendaal, Pattensen, Turkeyen, Cummings Lodge and Industry. Many persons with heart problems probably died the same night.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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