NICENESS IN GUYANA
June 6, 2015 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source
I saw a beautiful thing today. It involved a school child no more than four years old and a traffic rank that was directing traffic in the city.
The child was standing at the side of the road waiting to walk across the zebra crossing. The child was small and puny, and was dressed in his school uniform. The police traffic rank saw the child having difficult time crossing, went across the road, held his hand and walked him over the zebra crossing.
It was so lovely to see the policeman show such consideration to a small child. It showed that there are still decent people in this world and decent men and women in the Guyana Police Force.
I was discussing this incident with a friend and he said that perhaps the policeman was a product of the older generation. What was I hearing? A product of what? The older generation?
Old people would like us to believe that things were better in their time. They would like to feel that the lack of common courtesy that is shown these days is a product of the present generation. They like to put down the present generation and blame all the problems that abound on the young people of today.
This was essentially the angle that my friend was taking when he suggested that the policeman who assisted the child to cross the street was a product of the older generation. He was associating the courtesy of the policeman with the upbringing he received from the older generation.
What I can tell you is that in the old days if you were old and slow and you were on the road, then this same generation which we now call the older generation would give you hell. Old people walking on the road would be tormented by children. They would be stoned and interfered with. They would be called all manner of names.
Once you were old and lame and had to use the roadways, you had to be on your lookout for the tormentors. You had to be wary.
These old people were helpless. They were feeble and because they lacked the agility of youth, they would be picked upon by the youngsters, some of whom were young enough to be their grandchildren.
But it was not only old people that came in for torment. If a stray dog was passing at the same time that school was out, that dog had better run for his or her life. Stray dogs were viciously set upon by school children who somehow did not realize the cruelty of their actions.
It was almost as if colonial society had inflicted so much violence on the population that it came to be seen as acceptable to inflict cruelty on others regardless of whether they were old people or animals.
These same young ones who molested old people are now the older generation. So I am not so sure that I can agree that because someone did a nice thing on the road for a child, it should be attributed to traditional values inherited from the older generation.
The young generation of today does not molest old people on the road. In fact, they assist the old people who are lame and cannot move around with agility. The younger generation must be given credit for not adopting this practice of abusing old people. The young generation also does not stone stray dogs. They run from them because the stray dogs we have these days are not rice eaters; they are flesh gougers. But I suspect also that the younger generation is not as cruel as their predecessors.
What worried me though was what been the child doing on the road all alone. This child was too small to be sent to school unaccompanied. The child should have been accompanied by an adult or an older child. What was even worse was that child was traversing the road all alone during the busiest period of the day. This was carelessness of the part of his parents.
I do not think that we have gone that bad in this country that a parent or guardian cannot find someone to ask to accompany a small child to school. There are many persons who would have helped.
The policeman did help the child to cross the road. It was nice of him to do that. We need a lot more niceness in Guyana.