The desecration of modern civilization in Guyana

The most tragic thing to have happened to this country since Mr. Jagdeo’s presidency is the next generation’s ignorance of what constitutes modern civilization. And Mr. Ramotar is quite happy to follow Jagdeo’s pattern.  Any psychologist would tell you that if a human lived with certain sub-standard values all his/her life, then those are the values that he/she uses to judge people, institutions and life itself.
Take a simple example. The University of Guyana does not have a bookstore at all. The UG bookstore disappeared in the mid-eighties and that was then. Now if you were educated at UG, you would have no concept of what a university bookstore is. If you are touring a foreign university, you will not ask to see the bookstore because you are not aware of the concept of a university bookstore.
The same with garbage. If you grow up in a country where garbage in the entire country is ubiquitous, then you see nothing wrong at all with taking discarded stuff and putting at the roadside. It is not that you are dirty or cheap or unhygienic. It is simply that the type of value is normal and acceptable as you know it.
This is what is so dangerous about the continued rule of the PPP. These power-holders are simply not interested in arresting the desecration and destruction of civilization in Guyana. Take historical records. What occurred in the UK a month ago will never happen here unless we make a start.
Google the words, “twins find each other after 78 years,” and you will see what is normal will never happen in Guyana.
The twins were given away in the 1930s by their poor mother who couldn’t bring them up. Just a tiny detail led to a meticulous search through the birth and death registry of various towns in England, then to the US. And the documentary trail was there. If you go into our archives you can see before your very eyes the decay of documents that could never be replaced.
Leonard Craig is a witness to what I saw at the Brickdam Police Station. We were on the second level waiting to see an officer over police foot-dragging on a rape case. We decided to wander inside the building. We stumbled upon an empty storeroom full of cartons of station entry books.
The pages for several of these books were missing and dozens of pages were scattered on the floor. The books themselves were in a terrible condition.
A station entry book is a recording of all the transactions between the station and the public who came to the station to make a complaint or related business. Some of these books were dated as recent as 1999. What this means is that vital data on criminal matters are lost forever. It is a researcher’s nightmare.
Let us say that I go to Brickdam and complain that I saw my neighbour having sex with a goat (not the goat that bit a politician). I told them that I can distinctly remember on the day of the national election in 1997, I made a similar complaint. Suppose my neighbour says that I am lying, the records for 1997 will show that I am not. All the officer in charge has to do is go back to 1997, using the day of the election, and he will find the statement. But those station entry books are rotting in a room at Brickdam Police Station.
A citizen told Mark Benschop and me five years ago that a very prominent woman who was once the common-law wife of a certain authoritarian PPP politician at the time was involved in an accident in which his child was killed in the midnight hour. He said the woman and the driver, who was the son of a former Cabinet Minister, ran off the road at Land of Canaan and killed his teenage child.
The victim’s father actually complained to his lawyer and Benschop and I met him at the lawyer’s request in her office. I subsequently found out that Grove Police Station does not have the station entry book for that year. The books for that year and subsequent years were discarded.
What that means is that there is absolutely no record any longer of that fatal accident. Researchers investigating the abuse of power in Guyana for that period have lost valuable insight into how the police were cowed by the ruling elite. I encountered the same problem at the Kitty Police Station involving a former Vice Chancellor of UG.
The station books for that year and other years have been dumped. Civilization in Guyana is disappearing.