Guyana Chronicle
May 16, 2001

GEORGETOWN Mayor Hamilton Green has lashed out at vandals who disfigure monuments in the city, for which significance they have a total disregard.

Speaking in his weekly broadcast last weekend, he said he observed that persons have erected vending stands on the Square of the Revolution and the Indian Monument Garden is regularly vandalised.

"... this means we have neither respect nor regard for these two significant places, which should be held with reverence by every member of society, but particularly, by the two major groups," Mr Green remarked.

Noting that builders waste and plastic "adorn our canals and trenches", the Mayor admonished those responsible to desist from this practice.

Green said residents are putting up structures with gay abandon anywhere and somehow feel it is their right to do so.

He also mentioned mini-buses stopping on corners, some going through red lights and young men playing their music from carts loud enough to disturb.

"Our parapets are daily disgracefully defiled," he added.

According to him, these are not mere acts of lawlessness and violations born of selfishness but the manifestation of the much wider problem of estrangement from society, or more directly put, evidence of alienation.

"It is a matter that requires very deep thought, followed by programmes to correct this drift to what can be the most debilitating cancer to harm our society, much more than we imagine.

"It is this alienation, which produces, in some people, behaviour patterns arising from conflict within themselves.

"...this leads them to be unfriendly towards their society and the culture it carries," Green posited.