Dear Editor,
I note that big people in Guyana have had their say on school violence (“CEO, McDonald weigh in on school fights, language barriers facing Venezuelan students”, SN April 19, 2024, refers). Interesting. Though helpful, I think that both well-meaning Guyanese didn’t go where they should have in addressing the two issues, school violence and Venezuelan children. I try.
First, violence seems to saturate the consciousness, the all-purpose resolution to conflicts, even when there isn’t a real one. American schools and sports, as well as some of the routines (public transportation systems) have had their share of violence. Religious places have been invaded and violence unleashed leaving its bloody trail. Of alarming development has been those well publicized instances where bullying and ganging up and giving it a good go have all led to the explosions of violence in classrooms and in the vicinity of school premises. I hesitate to use the phrase ‘epidemic of violence’ but these well-televised and social media incidents tell their own story and make their own impressions on young minds.
Guyanese school children are not exempted, given media exposure. Fix the problem, the disagreement, with fists. Though rough enough, there have been reports of matters proceeding beyond mere fists and proceeding past the children. Parents. The peacemakers that should have been part of the de-escalation (parting the fight, as Guyanese say) become part of the howling pack of perpetrators of violence all too frequently. Our children see that and come to their own conclusions. And no one knows what they hear in their homes from adults in the most pungent language and postures about blows that are needed to set matters right. Such has its own education and are readily absorbed by impressionable minds.
Second, I shudder to, but must, point to Guyana’s premiere house of deliberation, the august National Assembly. Well, it used to be at one time, wasn’t it? Guyanese homes have been treated to repeated expressions and examples of the worst degrees of bawdy, bizarre, and psychically brutalizing behaviour from a bastion of what should be a marketplace of civilized conversation. Instead, the warped and the depraved, the demented and the obscene, have degraded Guyana’s house of lawmaking, its pristine parliament, into a ghetto of goons and those who glory in the titillating. There has been the violence of words hurled, violence intended to crush dissent, and violence to diminish the spirit. The heat and beat of the street have taken up residence in Guyana’s first house. This is what has been piped into Guyanese houses.
The children have either seen or heard. If they can do it, what about we (me)? If this is how they are, when those who are now through and through the decayed detritus of Guyana this way, why is there a problem with my way, which does a close imitation of them in parliament? Both the PPP Government’s CEO and the PNC/ GTU’s executive skirted around that little embarrassment, those powerful and persuasive projections coming out of parliament. I think that those profane instances of hostility and aggression have had durable utility (disutility) to our children. To avoid referring to this is to come out on the left side of what is relevant, what is compellingly honest.
Finally, there are Venezuelan children. Migrant children have it difficult in the best of circumstances. The Guyana-Venezuela situation is far from the best of
anything. Children become targets, easy victims. They are different, they are strangers, they may be seen as all that is bad from our neighbours. Like foreign TV, like parliament, so frayed relations with Venezuela fuels fires in children, which leads to the unacceptable, the always condemnable. Language is a contributor, but so also is the roiling geography of Guyana.
All Guyanese know very well what the volatile relations between this country’s two major ethnicities have done to Guyanese children. From father to son, and mother to daughter, some unmentionable psychic and sociological wounds have been the legacies given to succeeding generations. They have pierced and hurt, haven’t they? And they have devastated this society. The Venezuelan developments are another unwanted truth that must be faced. I remind my fellow citizens of those harrowing social media images of Guyanese men brutalizing Venezuelans, both male and female, in the days of that troubling December referendum. If the adults are of this heinous mindset, then what could be expected of the little ones?
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
