Dear Editor,

At 7.30am on a cool Sunday morning, May 17, 2009, the telephone rang. After I answered it and identified myself, a mature female voice asked, “Conrad?” The reply was “Madam, I think you have the wrong number.” The caller then says, “Okay.” My reply was, “Madam it cannot be ‘Okay.’” The reply was, “Yes it’s okay because it’s the wrong number.” I said, “Madam, it would be proper if you had said that you were sorry or expressed your apologies for disturbing me… since you took me out of the bathroom to answer my phone.” Incoherent reply. Others would have been verbally abusive if you had dared to teach them basic manners.

The 11th  edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘Ok (Okay)’ variously as expressing agreement, satisfactory, fairly good, introducing an utterance or permissible. None of these is relevant to the foregoing experience. I often wonder what the majority of Guyanese mean when they use the word ‘okay’ in listening to a tale being told by another, and where sometimes it can be interjected no less than ten times in a two-minute conversation. I can only conclude that there is a mental shallowness whereby a number of us cannot interject ‘Really?’; ‘Are you serious?’; ‘Are you joking?’; ‘Alright!’; ‘I don’t believe you!’; ‘Is that so?’; ‘You are pulling my leg.’

You very seldom hear any of these. Why? Because it is too high falutin’. I refuse to accept that times have changed, but would opine that the inability of the great majority of us to make a healthy or witty remark on most matters and take a logical position on a number of issues is because our vocabulary is seriously deficient. One would therefore have to blame the home environment and the teachers for a lack of healthy speech and debate. The alternative is the use of profanity and expletives to express one’s position, and hence, the resort to domestic violence in a number of cases. I have heard many children say, “Look, a brick buss e head.”

Is it ‘okay’ for a draycart to operate after sunset without a lantern hanging beneath the tray and a flambeau held aloft at the end of the tray? For cyclists to ride against the one-way street around Bourda Market in full view of city constables, or at night without a headlight? All in full view of Guyana’s finest.

Editor, there is a tacit refusal by a majority in this society to address matters logically, in essence to give a categorical yes or no to matters which do not call for a science degree. There is an unethical and misplaced bias in the society and this is working against basic learning in the education system. There is a failure to teach our youths in or out of school what is regarded as exemplary behaviour.

Is it ‘okay’ for someone to stand in the middle of a pavement conversing with another forcing others to walk around? And when you dare to ask for an excuse it evokes anger and resentment? Why? Is it ‘okay’ if perchance, our well trained Immigration Officers were to greet a passenger as ‘Big Man,’ or similarly a member of a police team carrying out a raid at 4 am to address the head of a household as such? What about a Guyanese passenger presenting himself to a customs or other officer at Grantley Adams Airport Barbados, and addressing him as ‘Uncle’?

Editor, until we are capable of displaying basic exemplary behaviour and logic we are going nowhere. It is for this reason that some years ago I told a meeting of the United Nations Association of Guyana (UNAG) that it is extremely difficult for the Conflict Resolution Project funded by CIDA to achieve any success in communities without a citizenry which thinks logically.

Yours faithfully,
Aubrey Alexander