THE year 2017 is now with us; and so, too, are the guns in criminal hands, and the grassroot Cultural Industry of Jewellery that crime has spawned. People were afraid to go to the aid of an old lady on Light Street late New Years Day, as two young men wrestled her for her handbag.
Citizen cowardice? No! Just citizens being realistic! The street thug could be armed. And they will shoot! Because they, the thieves, are themselves nervous and afraid; and because of this, they have, on more than one occasion, shot each other to death.
My wife doesn’t do a lot of walking; until the last few months. She came home upset one evening close to Christmas. Passing on the pavement by Fogarty’s, she witnessed some new additions to the drug addict population: Young men in their late teens to mid-twenties.
We dwelt on the subject anew, this time with not only her full attention, but her added fiery enthusiasm.

MACABRE SUB-CULTURE
We have had some experience with that macabre sub-culture of addiction, but confronted by its collective consequences is something else.
I outlined to her the list, some items from my practical experience, of all that needed fixing: Education, health, our laws, creating jobs, which latter, so far, none of the political or media columnists with their myriad analyses seem to have one single proposal for.
We live in circumstances that envelope us, but we have to learn from every predicament, for knowledge is indeed power.
So, how did we get here? As Paloma once wrote, in a poem recited in the presence of Mrs Jagan, “How did it come to this?”
There is no one answer, but many hesitations, failures and bouts of wishful thinking by the authorities as they contemplate the usefulness of the lumpenproletariat and their higher-echelon confederates, some their friends, to possible schemes.
Letter writers lament the youthfulness of our criminals; surveys as far back as 2012 have lamented youth unemployment. In past articles, I have outlined the causes for the severe shrink in muscle-based semi-skilled jobs.
The peculiar haunt of our time is the violence of crime today. Our school systems, to date, do not train students for self employment. Though there were attempts to have business persons engage students, those business persons could not, however, without guidance, articulate at the level necessary, as the majority of businesses are housed vendors, and not manufactures, or hardly innovators.
There are no school-related programmes in this area, targeting young minds; encouraging the exploration of self-managed careers.

RECENT HISTORY
Now, to necessarily flashback on the recent history that is the legacy of our time. The suitcase trading in the 80s filled the void in commodity shortages, and opened the minds of Guyanese to other places and other options.
Soon, they were smuggling marijuana to Guyana from Jamaica, then from Guyana to Barbados etc. Then, in the mid-80s, cocaine entered the fray. One of the first hits occurred in Roxanne Burnham Gardens, and was said to be organised by a reputed wife against her reputed husband.
Social Guyana, as usual, was indifferent, and the creature grew. But the chasm that currently haunts us was formulated in the era President Granger coined ‘The Troubles’, when, for the first time in the history of this country, a president and his Cabinet would engage and surrender the authority of dealing with a social breakdown between 2002 to 2006 into the hands of a criminal enterprise, whereby a minister obtained sensitive equipment and place it into the hands of the local broker of the Latin American narcotic industry, namely ‘The Roger Khan drug cartel and its criminal militia’.
This period, presided over by President Bharrat Jagdeo, has never really been explored for the damage it has inflicted on the national psyche, especially on those with no references of a previously normal, better time.
Guyana’s young would suffer the most, psychologically. Imagine killers, career criminals and known “bad people” being sworn in as rural constables; the Police Force being told to step one pace back, with orders being given to special death squads that if you see a wanted man, “Shoot!”, regardless of the civilian casualties.
Our young men especially were lured into becoming untrained soldiers in defence of private political officials, many of them with unbecoming tastes, but with adequate funds to spoil and steal their souls.
In my many letters to the newspapers back then, I lamented the destruction of traditional values; values that insisted that if the child didn’t show aptitude for academics, then they learn a trade, but never, never to become gunmen, with assurances that they were above the law, and that murder was a career.
**Now we have a generation of unskilled, semi-literate and unemployable youth that seem to know nothing else. That political mismanagement of Guyana stole the normalcy from our way of life, and its legacy is far from gone, because the culture of the criminalised nation overflowed into our public ministries and into religion, tainting the Joint Services and officialdom in general.

THE NOUVEAU RICHE
But elements of all mentioned did not begin with the Roger Khan intensification. Before that were the political policing groups that began to exceed the authority of the Police Force with fatal results for citizens in many cases. Most of that group constituted the nouveau riche of the criminal business class, an accepted group within the post- 1992 Administration.
Darkness does not tip the social scales unless unleashed by leadership so inclined; the callousness that prevails today was nurtured and empowered by characterless leadership.
On January 3, 2017, I saw the father of Alisha Foster in the Bank. As a father myself, I feel the weight of that man’s grief; he doesn’t smile anymore.
Though I was told (but did not verify) that the man who ordered her execution died from a Viagra binge the very night he received the document that this young professional, in doing her job for the EPA, had prevented him from obtaining on legitimate grounds, it was no conciliation.
He did not fire the gun; and her killers may still be out there. They have not paid, but a prevailing social and political atmosphere permitted solving things with ‘hitmen’ almost sure that with the right connections one would not be answerable.
The deeper concern our society has wavered is the mental state of the ‘killer’. In this regard, not the man or woman who, in a heated struggle with another human, had resulted in someone’s death, but the cold predator who creeps up on at times a defenceless person and murders that person.
I have known a policeman, one Sergeant Cummings, who belonged to one such squad. The last conversation we had, which was during the Veerapen investigation, he had become a shell of the man I once knew him to be. Before his demise, he sought refuge in alcohol. No State should commit servicemen to extrajudicial murder, because, how do you turn them off?
A classic example is another sergeant now before the court; there is no real difference between them and the ordinary street thug. And now we have inherited the legacy of drugs to dumb the senses, to create, as Sigmund Freud did in Bavaria, the loss of apathy, and the product of the perfect killer.
This is a human reality. Enquire how many mental sanatoriums did the warring nations have to build after WWII, and we will begin to fathom the damage that period did.
January 2017 places every Guyanese with a social conscience to awaken to where we are and why, and to examine our efforts.
When we look at politicians parading across public and social media, we must begin to see them in the context of their contributions, not by the postulations and melodramatic gesticulations in the pretence of having a concern for our wellbeing.
The present is in the shadow of the recent past, but the future rests in our ability to silence the past for its crimes, and to mould the present for the future, to return respect for the law, compassion and social conscience and to not spare the rod and create the next social manifestation of the scourge of “Ali Baba and the 40 thieves”.