Dear Editor,
The law does not allow a man to saturate himself with the white or amber stuff to fortify himself with “dutch courage” in order to enable the commission of the worst offence against God and His humanity. My theology informs me that we were all made in His image hence the enormity of the offence.

Omwattie Gill is no longer with us. She, according to your editorial of Wednesday April 17, 2019, “was only 21 years old, the mother of a 7-month-old daughter and had been a victim of domestic violence”. Why? “What is the matter with my gender?” I ask rhetorically.

My generation was taught to respect women. This was basic education in our primary schools during the erstwhile years of myself and compatriots. The school I attended was school-mastered by my father. One day, during the mid-morning break, Beryl Green told me something I did not like. My response was to plant a manly cuff in her face. She smiled and then said triumphantly, “I am going to tell Sir”. She did. I heard C.O. Patterson’s bellowing voice from the top floor: “What, my son hit a girl? Boys go get him”.

Half of my standard six friends with great difficulty, subdued me, and held me down on my face. My father did a 15 minute workout on my derriere exclaiming with each lash “My son hit a girl?” I

extricated myself and ran home to the sanctuary of Aunt Blanche who was holidaying with us then. My father came home to continue the brutality but Aunt Blanche intervened and rebuked him. By the way, my abhorrence at the maltreatment meted out to my gender by women is likewise an aberration of the same barbaric kind but embalmed in subtlety. This meme must cease, forthwith.

Some males of the species currently abiding in Guyana and elsewhere are a disgrace to their creator. Teachers, Pastors and such ilk need to understand and inculcate the following to their anxious male charges from the earliest incubative period – we are male by birth and men by choice.

We have recruited a regime of cads and bounders, and rosters of rogues scholars who seem to be marinated in mischief because males have lost their moorings. What do we have now? Women have been infected by the orgies of violence and both genders seem to have outsourced their brain.

I understand very well the proliferation of maladroit males of the most unsavoury kind. I also understand how women could goad us to fury. Yet, that is no excuse for us to wage a donnybrook in the home of which the headship rests on us. (Oops no offence to the women’s equality corps).

I have a bullet proof repugnance and contempt for males who do not act manly. Males who prey on women, routinely, are really the scum of the earth. Males who by choice refuse to take the uplifting hands tendered by various governments and civic organisations, present or past to deliver them from the cycle of delinquency ought to be sanctioned. Our women folk must bear some responsibility. It is not wise to be cute and clueless. Women must understand that you have a duty to upgrade yourselves. The opportunities for individual, educational and social uplift were not available in my day. Yet our generation of Guyanese produced the best of humanity of their day. Most readers are not aware that in the 60s British Guyana had the greatest amount of graduates per capita in the Commonwealth.
Men, surely we can do better. Now oil would be flowing soon.

Money would begin to flow like the oil. This writer is not a prognosticator of doom and gloom but yet I am not excited at its advent. Oil is likely to lay the foundation that would spawn politicians who would take their overweening and arrogant postures to a new level and with that our young men.

May the dark side of our social endeavour cease and may the realisation of our common humanity jerk us all into the reality of who we really are as Guyanese of the human kind.
Regards
Justice (Ret’d) James Patterson
Chairman
Guyana Elections Commission