It was with a sense of disgust and urgency for change – real change, revolutionary change – that I read the report in your newspaper regarding a magistrate who recently sentenced 19-year-old Steven King to two years imprisonment for being in possession of a single bullet. After I read that shocking report, I silently pledged to the God of the Oppressed that as long as I continue to have the breath of life that God gave me, I shall continue to resist the unjust and repressive powers that be, until a new dispensation emerges in this moral, spiritual and political wasteland known as Guyana. This country needs a radical alternative administration, one that is capable of humbling the mighty and haughty, and exalting the poor and powerless.
Former Mayor of Georgetown, Hamilton Green, expressing his shock at the harsh sentencing of this youth aptly referred to “the law as an ass” – a phrase popularised by the English writer and social critic, Charles Dickens, and often quoted in legal matters. And yes, though the law may be an ass, the law does not come into existence on its own, in a vacuum. If “the law is an ass” as indeed it so often is in Guyana, then it follows that the men and women who keep these laws in place and enforce them are also asses or jackasses, a label that Forbes Burnham used when referring to those who lacked the courage to implement real change and who instead, continue to uphold oppressive and regressive systems and laws
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP)