Dear Editor,
Guyana has become an unusually and morbidly violent place. The gut wrenching and sickening use of all sorts of force by the violent on their victims to satisfy lusts for power, money and compliance has reached proportions equal to that manifested in Caligula’s Rome. It’s offensive.
At the Timehri International a taxi driver with arm cocked above his head asked my five-year-old daughter if she wanted him to “buss her head?” Upon my aggressive protest he said “with this plastic bottle”. My response was “not even with that”. That incident caused me to reflect and ask the question “when did Guyana become a place which bred adult males who upon seeing a five-year-old girl would conjure up the thoughts expressed above?”
Young Gopaul’s fatal experience for me is unbelievable, comprehendible but unacceptable! Unbelievable, because of the combination of: the protracted and violent nature of her abuse; the perpetrators of the crime; the reasons; her friends’ attempts to help; the failure of the state appointed institutions to respond for her safety; the fatal failure of intimate and state trust! It is comprehendible because of my experience at the airport and the now common way in which people are thrown away all over the country.
This waste of youth, potential, femininity, and in Burnham’s own words “today’s leadership” must have root causes in the beliefs of some powerful segment of the Guyanese society and which have now shaped the nations institutionalized values. I have searched my mind for some place in Guyana under Burnham or Hoyte when excuses would have sufficed for a tragedy like this one. Something decadently new is happening.
I add my voice to the outcry and say it’s unacceptable. I say, I hear the excuses being offered by the state officials but really think that their hands are karmically stained with young Gopaul’s blood.
I think that the nation should undertake a study on the use of violence in Guyana, from the arrival of the Europeans to present, with the aim of diagnosing the roots of this epidemic and coming up with relevant prescriptions and find public officials with the mental and moral fortitude to execute those prescriptions put them there and hold them accountable.
Enough is enough.
Yours faithfully,
Jonathan Adams
