EDITOR: It is the Christmas season, and traditionally in the Christian modus, it is an ideal time to bury the hatchet with our enemies, and take care not, at this time of year anyway, to allow our prejudices and biases to get the better of us.

As a recovering mental patient, currently disenfranchised, I have a hard time with the way peers in the same situation are treated. People who know me, also know that I am not defined by my situation, and for these fans I have a newspage in the works in which donations will be solicited as per the support already of some friends in the past because of a well versed former journalism career.

However, over time, if you let me editor, I will air grievances on discrimination here – since this would be the best forum for this, a newspaper.

Recently, I was under the weather at one of the money services locations in Kingstown. Since I only have one ID, I was waiting for a friend to come by to cash the transaction. This guy, a typical twenty-something red-blooded Vincentian bigot, came in and wanted to know ‘what a crazy man was doing there, and he is going to have me removed’. A fair-skinned chubby employee/teller, began to laugh and add her commentary along the same lines as the bigot. The guy went out for the guardsman security who sniggered and sneered, making his own comment, but informed the bigot that I usually come here waiting for a lady, so it’s nothing he could do. This same security, a bony black weaselly guy years ago when I was off my medication ordered me to ‘move from there’ and stop standing there’… you get the picture.

I retreated to my sanctum that night, added them to my list and turned them over to a serious higher power. This process has worked evidentially in the past for me. One of my attackers lost his foot and his place of abode. There are others, but you get the picture. So if I can do that, why is it necessary to be writing here? This has to do with two events. A money service manager who indicated that Christmas or not, I would need two IDs to cash a gift from my uncle, and a guy I befriended in the line who had his transaction done with the same chubby fair-skinned teller having only one ID, in which, just as he pointed out to me, they facilitate people with one ID, bending the rule, where they see it fit.

Vincentians, be careful who you discriminate against, because there is no love lost whatsoever between myself and the person – any – who threatens my well-being.

Colin King