Stop supporting the tried and failed “isms and schisms”

Mar 13, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
Every day I read the letters and opinions, which are often followed by responses in your paper, and I keep asking myself if we are okay. I think about almost fifty years passing since Independence, and what the Colonial Rulers gave us; where we came from; and I compare what is experienced by the large majority of Guyanese every day.
I often get the feeling, as the saying goes “life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel”.
The shame of our fellowman, poverty – be it intellectual, economic, or moral – is in our face. Do one kind of people think it’s all a comedy show?
No! It is a designed strategy, of one narrow-minded set of humanity, to impoverish the gullible set.
Most of those who play wise heads and politicians, how about swapping positions like the show “wife swap”?
No coward or bully would come forward, unless it’s for a “photo-op”.
After fifty years of being fiddled with, most Guyanese still live their everyday lives, similar to when we were in the small, dirty, cramped, overcrowded conditions in the ship holds that brought us here, where for six months or more, we ate, died, mated and hoped, with no privacy – the psychological foundation of decency and every progressive human behaviour.
When the Colonial Rulers granted us our Independence, they made sure their gift, included 83 thousand square miles of living space, where under one million free people are entitled to by ancestral inheritance, and the land is impregnated with unimaginable quantities of mineral wealth, waterfalls of sophisticated potential, savannahs, forests filled with greenheart, fauna species, rivers and ocean, and many social infrastructures.
To crown it all, the people we see as enemies, gave us their Westminster doctrine, so we could guide ourselves to become an aristocratic nation.
But what do we do? First, our megalomaniac leaders abandoned the inheritance; blinded their eyes to the children’s conditions, which was the original reason for the Independence, “self rule”; took up ideological battle fronts; then the two of them – one, a disciple of Stalin, the other an incarnate of “Caesar” – launched themselves into a battle of the “capturing of minds”.
The beginning produced racial divisions, ethnic violence, and all forms of unimaginable suffering associated with such ignorance, then the economy became bankrupt, and to deflect the economical blunder, they conspired to hide their shame by nationalization and banning of imported basic food items, and in this downward spiral of political experimentation, forgot that across the racial divide, the children of people who experienced the conditions of the “ship holds”, have been returned to that condition.
The only difference is, the captains now look like us, and we are on dry land looking at the ocean. But our daily existence feels and very much looks the same.
Tight living areas, no privacy, young children, and parents, eating, getting drunk, mating and waking within sight of one another; many children in cramped and dirty conditions exposed to parental sexual displays; children exposed to drugs and noise by the parents who are supposed to protect them.
All this is combined with national, political and economical procrastination, as well as institutionalized ethnic suspicions.
We have a foundation for the next fifty years of keeping this nation suffering people in the belly of the ships, on the other hand, we can, as any right thinking female or male, abandon the abusers.
When it’s a spouse, they tell us to leave, run away; but when this nation’s political husbands plunge and keep us in hopeless and abusive conditions, the same advisers, change the song.
It is a fact that we may not all, ever, want, desire, or need Pradoville-like living conditions, but for sure, no one can realize their full human potential while being kept by political strategy in conditions resembling the belly of the ships, that brought our ancestors here.
Now that this nation is approaching fifty years of emotional nostalgia, and geographic negligence, it is decent that we stop supporting the tried and failed isms and schisms.
Calbert Ramphal

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Stop supporting the tried and failed “isms and schisms”

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