Dear Editor,

On Thursday October 22nd, 2009 Stabroek News on page 10 carried a rather depressing article wherein the new Shanklands Resort owner alleged some acts of harassment by the traffic police.  It was yet one more disgusting episode in the story of the daily experiences of the motorist in Guyana.

My last previous comment on this topic related to the cruel treatment meted out to some UK- based Jamaicans visiting for the World Cup Cricket 2007 who had committed the mortal sin of parking in that controversial area outside Celina’s at the Kitty sea wall.  Their detention by the Police through the dark of the morning was no advertisement of Guyanese hospitality or freedom of movement.  On that occasion I did raise the question of the apparent lack of expressed concern on the part of what we now brand as civil society.

Apparently it took that most shameful episode of police brutality and highlighted in full colour last weekend to jolt some of us out of the moral slumber and cosy comfort that permitted the descent into the recent atrocities.  Some of us in our own lassitude had apparently deluded ourselves into concluding that “it couldn’t happen here”, blithely forgetting that every apparently small act of tolerated indiscipline or lawlessness is symptomatic of the moral decay that we refuse to admit as our present national burden.

Some of us saw no connection between the licensing of motor vehicles with exaggerated tinted windows or fancy number plates that contravene the statutory format; illegal ‘no parking’ signs on the roadway; unlighted bicycles and carts of all descriptions that render nighttime driving a hazardous exercise; the inordinate honking of motor horns; the creation of blind-corners by restaurateurs who illegally extend their territory to the edge of the roadway; the unrestrained harassment of the public by the traffic-police of the type mentioned first above; the appalling conditions of holding-cells at police stations; the Hon. Minister’s refusal to establish ‘five-star hotel’ conditions at the Brickdam lock-ups (our silence then will be an everlasting shame.)

I go no further.  It seems we’re now awake.  But we dare not abandon this grave issue until we make full response to its ominous message and accept this as a time for self examination and resolve firstly to admit our own faults as a prelude to addressing those of society and the governmental administration.

And so to civil society I should dare to quote against a relapse into complacency, some words of Shakespeare which he placed in the mouth of Brutus after the murder of Julius Caesar.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

And to my fellow Christians from the Biblical Book of Proverbs (chapter 6) I may warn

How long will you sleep, O sluggard?
When will you come out of your sleep?
Yet a little sleep, a little slumber; a
little folding of the hands to lie down and
sleep; so will your poverty come as a robber
and your want as an armed man.
Now is the hour

Yours faithfully,
Leon O. Rockcliffe