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#Speakingout – Noise all night long

by Barbados Today
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Some people derive pleasure and satisfaction from making others uncomfortable. They lack the ability to sympathise. Empathy is nowhere to be found in their mental make-up.

As a boy no one flew more kites than I. My mother used to notice that my skin became darker during the long vacation between July and September, resulting from hours upon hours of exposure to the sun. I could never understand, though, the reason for flying a kite at night. We called it “staking out”. Is the objective simply to make uncomfortable other people downwind from the owner of the kite?

Back then, in the forties and fifties, kites were not as noisy as they are these days. They were appreciated for their beauty and design, not their noise. Kite flying was also a skill.

The noise-making part of the kite, known as the “bull”, like the kite itself, was made of thin paper. Many a villager got an unexpected respite when the night rain fell because it invariably brought the kite down. Not so these nights: the kite flies on because it is usually made of plastic – that double-edged sword of modern civilisation. The “bull” nowadays, like the plastic it is made of, never wears out, and the noise, like a bulldozer in the sky, goes on throughout the night.

Back then, there was such a thing as “kite season”, at Easter time. Nowadays, it’s all year round; especially at Christmas. I saw a man—not a boy—“letting out” a massive square kite the other night… at 7 o’clock. A few minutes after he got it in the air, he could no longer see it; he could only hear it, and hundreds of law-abiding citizens in the district had to put up with the noise for the remainder of the night.

Are we going to torture those who “gather” among us next year with this foolishness?

Carl Moore

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