When old habits meet new, ‘uncensored translations’

GROWING up, there were always adults and peers you tried to avoid, from witnessing you do anything that could amount to a bold adventure, like picking somebody’s fruit without permission. I mean, not raiding the fruit tree with a basket to sell; that was ‘thiefin’ outside of our consciousness. Even walking home with a female schoolmate; no touching, that was forbidden. It was just smiles and awkward, unrehearsed chatter. Or punching tunes with fellow conspirators at a punch box at some ‘pickney-not-allowed’ licensed liquor shop, while the shopowner was busy trying to scamp a half-drunk customer, we absorbed the melody and learnt the forbidden lyrics of a tune that was banned from the radio, until his attention zooms in at the punch box and sees our school uniforms, and shouts, “Wuh dese lil bwoy doing deh?” And we were gone. Yes, not every song made it to the morning wake-up programme, but we knew them anyhow.

In comparison to back then, what is different today is that there were censorship rules and codes of conduct. Based on nurturing awareness and sensitivity, they didn’t seek perfection. Perfection is a tremendous task, like the lyrics of the song from the movie, ‘The Man from La Mancha’- ‘To fight the unbeatable foe’. They sought to develop a sense of inner judgment to enable us, hopefully, in the majority, to positively balance our social senses, with a responsible influence on our impulses.

Today, there are no punch boxes. There is worse: Legions of drugs, smartphones, social media predators, a loss of empathy, obsessions driven by conspicuous consumption, and too many victims. Because the social media universe is new, luring and exciting, also parallel to the positives, an accommodating legion of negatives will exist in Guyana, open to the 18% who have phones and computers, and the rest informed by born gossipers, the latter an aged and perfected vice of misinformation and betrayal of confidences.
Thus, people who have been damaged by misplaced trust, or coerced into broken creeds may need comfort zones to heal.

FINDING ONE’S COMFORT ZONE
A comfort zone is not a permanent place; it’s dangerous if you cannot attribute blame to beginnings, meaning one’s own environment and actions towards the betrayal of trust by another.
Now, if social media is a common place for you to hang your heart out, and the betrayer of your trust boasts of the actions that have affected you, then you may attract ‘the worse’, engaging you in a sympathetic tone, empathising, feigning discreet camaraderie, to which you bare your soul, seeking sympathetic understanding that turns out to be all about the violation of that comfort zone into an expansion of a further episode serial of that betrayed trust, for the popularity of a callous gossip predator. That can lead to further deterioration, even suicide or violence.

There are popular social media characters who seek attention through social gossip, based on someone’s misery through the betrayal of trust towards creating a gossip, and they are not to be confused with journalists, social activists, or columnists. Their agenda is different. It is not about healing; bringing clarity that appeals to the public or official conscience. It is about the inflated ego, and lies must be told, and people must be destroyed for the ‘Inflated Ego’ to be fed.

Some years ago, at a wake, there was a debate about a person who was suspected to have committed suicide. What appeared to have happened was that the person was coerced into a course of defining actions that could be described as ‘soul-changing conduct’. The person afterwards retreated from the ‘crew and the course of the actions’, and returned confused to their former domicile. It was there, it was presumed, that the person had committed suicide. At the wake, the debate was that the suicide was forced. I held my ground, and maintained that as a big brother, father and grandfather, the most difficult thing I have experienced was to get a child to swallow a tablet that the child did not want to swallow, much less the multiple tablets involved in that incident, with no evidence of force. No side gave quarter; no one conceded, but a life was lost.
In closing, society is a complex organism; it has to be managed. It cannot be left on its own to repair and gain sustenance. Like all forces of life, society has to be watered, fertilised, pruned and protected for its best-sustaining fruit to evolve above nature’s balance of predators.