…youths
Back in 2011, London was wracked by riots during which youths looted stores for the fancy clothes and the expensive “gear” they affect nowadays. The Mayor of London blamed it on “people in this city, sadly, who are intent on violence, who are looking for the opportunity to steal and set fire to buildings and create a sense of mayhem, whether they are anarchists or part of organised gangs, or…feral youths.”
Now if you’re going to call youths pillaging from stores as acting like animals in the wild…what do you call the youths in Guyana who confessed to killing two taxi drivers – by first trying to strangle one and when that failed, by bludgeoning him to death? In London there was a section of society that jumped up in outrage at the Mayor for his description of the youths. But what metaphor can better describe people that can so callously and gruesomely kill another human being than “wild animals”?
Now we can go into all sorts of explanations and analyses as to how they became wild animals – single parent, poverty, poor supervision…whatever – but we can’t escape the fact that the killer youths acted like wild animals. To be “human” is not just to be born into the species “Homo Sapiens” but to act in a manner that makes you a part of “humanity”. It has all to do with how you act – and you’re not supposed to act like animals.
Now we can move on to talk about the “why?” – not as academic speculation, but so that maybe, we can see how we’re going to deal with this problem. Because it IS a problem – a big problem. In addition to the taxi drivers youth killers, we had the three youths who robbed a business in Paradise (did you get the irony?) and before that, the depredations by the “Hot Skulls” gang operating out of Albouystown.
Right off the bat, we can discard the above mentioned “causes” being in some way deterministic. We all know tons of children in those circumstances that don’t go around bludgeoning people to death. But we can detect a connection with the looting feral youths of London and the killers of Guyana: they all wanted to enjoy the paraphernalia of what defines the good life nowadays.
But they want to get their hands on those accoutrements the easy way – not through working for it. So it all comes down to how young people are being socialised to see how they can get the good things of life.
Among other things, we have too many opposition politicians encouraging the culture of resentment and envy in our youths.
…electricity thieves
But on the other hand, you do have the same kind of feral behaviour among some grown big men and women – those who steal electricity. You can’t be seen as common humanity if you force your neighbour to pay for your enjoyment of the good (electrical) life. Wild animals, that’s what your Eyewitness calls them.
We heard evidence that big businesses steal more than half of all electricity in Guyana! Now here you have people who can pass on their electricity costs as expenses – yet they prefer to steal. This is the kind of greed that removes them from the realm of humanity.
It was also revealed that the other big electricity thieves are in Sophia and South Georgetown. And we come to the same mindset as with the feral youths – these people want the good things of life but don’t want to pay for them.
Or is it that they all were inspired by the practically free electricity Linden receives?
…politicians
There are some that see the term “feral politicians” as a tautology. But what else can you call the politicians in the AFC who cut appropriations for Amerindian development? And boast they will cut it again? Wankers?