The reason I am on the picket line

Oct 11, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One day, Lincoln Lewis called me on the phone. People like Lincoln Lewis I have known since the seventies when I was a young UG student. There are many persons like Lincoln Lewis that fought the Burnham Government and who are still active in their own ways. Mr. Lewis was one of the trade unionists who formed an alternative body to the TUC, Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FITUG).
So one day, Lincoln called and in his inimitable, rushed tone shouted out that no one is doing anything about the dictatorial things the Government is getting away with.
There was no way I could have disagreed with him because in the thousands of columns I have written since 1992, I have made that point several times. So Lincoln suggested that we form a small picket line outside the Office of the President. The tiny size was not a deterrent.
I have grown up with the experience of protesting for causes rather than looking at numbers on the picket line.
Why have I been on the picket line with Norris Witter, Lincoln Lewis and Mark Benschop for two days in last week? Because of the philosophical concept of obligation, I am not going to outline its meaning in a short column because space would not be left to offer a treatise on elected dictatorship in Guyana and that is the purpose of this essay
Briefly, obligation is one of the sacred concepts that have underpinned the continued existence of civilization. If humans do not understand and practise the concept of obligation, civilization would die.
The world remains intact and moral values form the fulcrum on which human relationships stand because in our interaction with people in general, we observe the ethical rule of obligation.
I have an obligation to me, to my heart and my mind to speak out against injustices that I spoke out against when I was sixteen, twenty, forty. Now I am in my fifties and I see the same brutalities, cruelties and tyrannies that I fought against when I was a scrawny youth growing up without food in Wortmanville.
The obligation to confront these recurring injustices becomes a psychic dilemma because if you did it then, why can’t you do it now? What was so wrong back then that you fought against that does not exist now? This is the obligatory question that people like me and thousands others (no doubt Lincoln faced that question too that is why he contacted me) who fought against the PNC in the seventies and the eighties have to solve in their own mental deliberations.
I am not physically weak. I am not in the throes of illness. Why then must I turn my back on my obligation to myself to continue to protest the degradation of Guyana by a dictatorial government?
This obligation takes on an esoteric dimension when one conjures up the past that we were once part of. That past was the Burnham dictatorship. We struggled against it. We won only to find as the years wore on that we lost. Obligation to one’s self then becomes a driving force inside your mind because Burnham’s small sins become silly peccadilloes when compared to the hegemonic perversities we see all around us.
I come now to elected dictatorship under the PPP. Whenever we discuss the failure of October 5, 1992 to liberate this nation from its ethnic fatalism, power excesses and entrenched administrative tyranny, the comparison between then and now cannot be avoided.
We don’t have to be learned men and women with university degrees to make that comparison. We know it, we feel it, we see it. What did Burnham do back then that is not being done now? More pertinent is the question – have the authoritarian extremes of Burnham been exceeded by the present government? To answer that effectively there must be the comparison of data, facts, statistics and graphic details.
For this activist here who lived in that period, and who lives in the present situation and have seen the cruelties of both epochs, I have my answer – Guyana is more of a frightening, fearful society with political decay and moral degeneracy than when President Forbes Burnham reigned with his PNC outfit and his concept of paramountcy of the party
The graphic details make for tragic reading and it leaves those who struggled to remove the Burnham regime with the intense obligation to right the wrongs of Guyanese history. If we could have defied Burnham over small potatoes why we are on the sideline watching helplessly as our country is devoured by new monsters. The obligation to continue to struggle must be accepted

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The reason I am on the picket line

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