I agree with the views expressed by Mr. Cort and Mr. Mervin in their recent letters. Like Mr. Cort and many other Guyanese, I too received and benefited from my fair share of corporal punishment during my childhood years, as any of my many friends and acquaintances can attest to.
Please allow me to state at this point that I am absolutely opposed to cruelty of any sort being meted out to anyone, especially children. However there happens to be a certain unmistakeable difference between disciplinary measures tempered by love in one's heart and outright cruelty that often stems from uncontrolled rage.
I must say that I view the very apparent desire of some individuals to have an all-out ban of such remedial action as nothing more than evidence of an even deeper-rooted desire to have Guyana become "Little America," regardless of the dire social consequences that are sure to follow. These are the same people who would have Guyana blindly follow every dumb whim or caprice touted by some so-called "authority" here in the US. Such individuals obviously fail to realise that in the US of today, just about any crafty writer with a desire for money or TV fame can come across rather authoritatively in a book of some sort.
I would ask those no-licks advocates; can Guyana withstand the consequences of the kind of moral and social decay seen in America and elsewhere? Can little Guyana afford the terrible cost to its most valuable resource?
Thanks to globalisation and the advances in technology, Guyanese can now experience an even closer view of the US and beyond, including all the good things life can offer. There is certainly nothing wrong with having a desire for those "nice things from outside." However, there is something terribly wrong with copying wholesale that which is downright evil, criminal, shameful and wrong. While striving after the "nice things from outside," Guyanese need to exercise the same old-fashioned common sense for which we were once famous and remember to exclude the foreign garbage.
Let us throw out the dirty bath water and keep the baby.