There are communities all across coastal Guyana whose ‘beating hearts’ are carefully concealed from the outside except outsiders are welcomed in. Those communities are frequently set at safe enough distances from easy access roads and by extension from a great deal of outside scrutiny. Strangers stick out like sore thumbs and can come to be viewed with suspicion.
Over time, those communities have nurtured and enjoyed their own indulgences, their own patterns of behaviour, much of these reflective of a resistance to being dictated to by ‘outsiders.’ Guyana, one might add, is not unique in that regard.
Many of the outdoor types in those communities are usually patrons of long-standing, if less than well-appointed local ‘Bars’ (if they can be so-described) where prices suit their pockets, the patrons are familiar with each other and where, frequently vigorous games of dominoes are a well-supported ‘extra.’
These are not easy habits to break; in fact they have become integral parts of long-standing routines. Not even the curfews and lockdowns that have arisen out of the coronavirus emergency have completely put a brake on this practice. Some of these tucked away communities appear to be holding fast to their set ways, their gatherings in close-proximity groups at the ‘bar,’ day and night and their persistence with their domino games where the ‘combatants’ cannot help but breathe and spew spittle in each other’s faces having become ways of life not easily replaceable.
At the end of their revelry they make their way home, many, perhaps most of them, to families, taking home with them, perhaps, much more than their inebriation.
There can be no question than that this practice cannot be allowed to persist cheek by jowl with the strenuous efforts that are now ensuing to minimise the impact of the coronavirus. Repeated reports emanating from the United States suggest that many of that country’s own ‘closely knit’ communities that have been hardest hit by the virus are among those that have demonstrated a minimal mindfulness of the social distancing refrain. Down the road, it could be our own ‘tucked away’ communities that could become the most vulnerable and ultimately hardest hit communities in the country. It is these communities, in large measure, that continue to provide a sustained and incomprehensible pushback against the precautions that few if any can, at this stage, pretend to be unaware of.
Nor does it appear that this disposition derives necessarily from a predisposition for breaking the law, but rather, from a misguided sense of being possessed of a right to make their own decisions as to how they entertain themselves. For some, it is (at least up to this point) less the physical threat that the coronavirus poses and much more the defensive strictures (like lockdowns, curfews and social distancing) that are regarded as the substantive problem. It is a reflection of a profound and frightening misunderstanding of just what we are up against and one for which, not too far down the road, we could pay a high price. In the circumstances, it cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.
This pushback by these communities against the strictures that could limit the extent of the coronavirus’ rampage does not manifest itself in any robust physical protest. It does so in ways that are impish and boisterous, seemingly oblivious to the sustained public information blitz that cautions against indifference and recklessness in the public response. In response to the persistent warnings that coronavirus might well change our lives forever the pushback communities protest the strictures which they say are (as we in Guyana sometimes casually put it) ‘cramping their styles’! They insist that the ‘normalcy’ of their present way of life, the pleasantness of the experiences of their ‘watering holes’ and the domino games that make for animated players spewing spittle and breathing in each other’s faces (some of the very concerns about the transfer of the virus that the experts have expressed) should not be compromised by strictures as ‘weird’ and as unheard of as social distancing.
Keeping the places of entertainment open and (as one subscriber to the ‘doctrine’ put it) “letting life go on” (the oddest possible choice of words in the circumstances) are not necessarily acts of substantive insurgency. They appear to derive from a shockingly misguided notion that not even the coronavirus should be allowed to disrupt the pattern of their lives.
So the insurgency and its attendant practices persist. Even as the health authorities and the public information infrastructure seek to provide treatment and care services and to disseminate potentially life-saving information, groups of dangerously misguided people waving ‘banners’ emblazoned with ‘messages’ about the sanctity of their lifestyles continue, simultaneously, to compromise the national effort to get us through this coronavirus gauntlet.
It is a kind of insurgency that has to be curbed by the sensitive but strict application of the law and by the persistence of a public information initiative that not only targets the transgressors, specifically, but seeks to get across to them the message of the enormous knock-on effect of the high price that the country as a whole might eventually pay for their insistence on holding on to their thoughtless, reckless indulgences.
