Things fall apart
Editorial
Things fall apart/The centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy/is loosed upon the world. All over Guyana there are signs, but of what? For some, they are signs of the last days of the world. For me, they are signs that in the last days of the millennium, we are content to let things fall apart. The things I want to talk about are things of differing levels of seriousness, but they are all serious. In a few days, there have been several unexpected and untimely deaths of people I know, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances: Butch Fraites, by shooting; Charles Kennard, my colleague on the National Development Strategy Commission, by car accident; Sylvana Jordan, by car accident; CA Wilson, by car accident; Olga Luti, another colleague from the National Development Strategy Commission, of causes that will have to be checked; Pancho Carew, "after a brief illness". There have been other unexpected and untimely deaths in very recent times. I know I'm omitting some as I list those which, in different ways, struck me with a kind of horror: the seventy-eight year old woman in Berbice (I will leave out her name deliberately) who may have been raped and tortured before being savagely murdered; the teenage child (I will leave out her name deliberately) who committed suicide, and to whose death too many commentators are responding as a kind of abstract object lesson; Clair Muss, Michelle Payne Brittlebank, Anthony DuBois, Eugene Duncan, Clive Hercules, Mark Adams, killed on the Linden Highway in the anarchy of our streets. In their different and same ways, these are terrible losses not only for their families, but for all the different kinds of communities to which they belonged, and for us as a community. And look how many of them are about death by anarchy, and about the epidemic of callousness in the country! Look, first, at how many are about what I just called the anarchy of the streets - the speeding vehicles, including but not only minibuses. The massive container trucks and other vehicles at road corners, blocking vision. The vehicles parked anywhere on the streets at night, without lights. The bicycles without lights. The right of every vehicle user to make any move, any stop, without signal. The right of the mini bus rider (of whom I am one) to disembark exactly where she or he chooses, and the accompanying right of the mini bus driver to stop anytime and anywhere and however suddenly he chooses. All semblance of "residential area" being gone, yesterday one mini bus driver told a friend of mine not to park outside my house because it was his bus stop. The deaths by medical callousness. I got a number of phone calls after the last column, each one telling me of more medical callousness in the public and private health care sectors. Meanwhile, the Minister of Health and the doctors continue their dispute over how to constitute the Medical Council. This shows real alertness to what is important. More complaints about the wrong diagnoses, the easy assurances to people that they're OK, only for them to find a few months later (and usually in another country) that they have an advanced case of some disease that was already there when they were told they were OK. The ward where urine drips down from the floor above. The AIDS patients left uncared for (including sometimes, by their families) as people with leprosy once were. By the way, thanks for the phone calls and the information, but except for one caller - Mrs Eileen Cox - none of you ever speaks out publicly or even makes a formal, unpublicised complaint, so how do you expect things to change? In smaller ways - smaller because they're not about life and death, though they are about the quality of life: the Camp Street millennium project depresses rather than elates me - which is not the fault of its organisers, but of the rest of us. On Camp Street, the "millennium" ends at Church Street. Shortly after, there is the unspeakable squalor of gutters filled to overflowing (bad word; these gutters can't flow) with bottles and boxes and paper and old food and God knows what else. Camp Street, like almost everywhere in Georgetown, is a sign of a kind of institutionalised anarchy of "do whuh yuh want". Georgetown has to be the most squalid capital in the Caribbean and is a disgrace to the rest of Guyana - no part of which I have seen looks, smells, or feels like this. Meanwhile, the City Council is like the Medical Council - paralysed by dispute. Buildings going up all over which any fool can see, don't meet legal requirements. Streets "fixed" last week collapsing into even bigger potholes. Squalor, Squalor, Squalor everywhere. (Incidentally, what is the meaning of those occasional flurries of activity by the City Council - road repair, cleaning, whatever - which then end without achievement except for those paid to achieve nothing?). Things fall apart, as witness Wednesday's Wild West shooting. I really can't continue now. Sometimes words aren't enough.
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