CULTURE and the philosophies that are its sinews create the false but suitable gods and devils that are used to divide, oppress and justify genocide.
The culture of a nation cannot be left dormant; it has to be nurtured and developed to grow with the imagination of its human sprout.
We in the New World can be considered fragmented cultural populations, where a cultural fabrication was engineered — and continues to be against the true grain of our reality — and skilfully imposed on our confusion and mis-education by interest groups within and without that found themselves in the position of holding the reins of power.
There’s no denying that laws are the foundation of culture; all our religious books revolve around laws. Laws that empower freedoms and rights such as “Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s goods” and “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” are profound and monumental in concept, but prove to be the most difficult laws for Mankind to uphold. All our problems seem to revolve around breaking those two laws that imply compromise and empathy.
MY CONDOLENCES
I want to begin here by extending my condolences to the Commissioner of Police on the recent loss of his brother.
Every conscious Guyanese is gripped by menacing shadows caste upon us by a cultural imbalance and decay and deflection of those very laws I referred to above; Whether by lack of character, or a callous release of the intoxication of social vices aimed at compromising all and sundry to govern over a proverbial crab barrel and gutters of market rats, rather than the egalitarian human voices of reason, demanding accountability, all evidence points to the latter.
A 15-year-old career criminal is most likely expected from nations that have endured the spiritual and physical devastation and trauma of war. What went wrong in Guyana cannot be swept under some shroud; we must; we HAVE to reckon with it. We endured a system that retarded our social fabric rather than progressed it.

THE NEW NORMAL
The 15-year-old from Sophia that confessed to murdering the Commissioner’s brother is not an anomaly; he is a new normal; the generation I referred to some five to six years ago in a letter titled, ‘Government has abandoned our youth’.
The 15-year-old today was born in 2002; the “jumbie stories” the adults were talking about in whispers as they grew up were real. To them, the “Phantom” is not a cartoon or comic-book character; the “Phantom” is the people who took the neighbour’s son from his home and he was never seen again; or drove up in a car and shot a school friend’s uncle.
How many shop owners were killed in Sophia? What were the images of success that dazzled these youth? At what age did they smoke their first “spliff”? For that matter, at what age were they encouraged to sell it to their school friends to get the “cheese” to buy the fake designer “proper threads”?
Sophia is no different from other neighbourhoods across Guyana, so, how did it all happen? How did Guyana stumble? The answer is that for over two decades, callous, self serving, race manipulative, shameless people in the majority held the reins of government; the decent ones were the cowards who looked the other way so they could live well.
Our condition that requires a social metamorphosis was created by a shape-shifting lumpen proletariat who saw in politics an opportunity to exalt themselves with absolute no idea of what was expected of them; nor did most of them care.
To corrupt a nation must begin with the cremation of the laws and all common principles, which must be replaced by a terrain of lawlessness and indulgences that must be allowed without interference.

THE ONLY ATONEMENT
The newspapers today reveal the extent that this was allowed; the only atonement that can serve to inspire lies in holding the political law-breakers of the past regime accountable.
The problem that will present itself, however, is that we do not know how many of those who feign social correctness today have benefitted from the droppings from the criminalisation of Guyana.
With their dual loyalties, which shall prevail? A swift goodbye to poverty, or the ideal and support for all that must go with it to lift Guyanese collectively out of the shadow world?
We are not the first nation to face this predicament; how we proceed has just begun. What must be remembered is that every current act, whether positive or negative, serves to develop the embryo of the Guyana we want to retire in; the hope rests in the fact that more than half of this population rejected the culture of malfeasance of the past regime.
That Guyana is experiencing a depressing blue-colour grass-root cash flow crisis cannot be denied; the world we depend on is going through a recession: The USA, Trinidad, Suriname, Venezuela, so remittances are no longer that frequent. And, locally, how do some ministries spend only 50% of their budgetary allotment? Is there a need for a think-tank directory to inspire obvious and necessary initiatives that will encourage those authorities to activate economic activities that would stimulate employment? Is changing PSs around enough to inspire that realisation?
It is expected that the tightening on avenues of “runnings” will be met with lamentations. SARU’s presence will tidy a usual extremely untidy income management system, with billions of “funny money” recipients contributing to the coffers meaningfully; that “funny money” that had created gods, financed the “Phantom” and closed doors and impoverished many through money laundering and allowed tax evasion, while laughing at public servants who carried the main tax burden of this nation from 1966.
The decriminalisation of Guyana will entail warfare for the “will” of the nation, but it has to be done.