When race/ethnicity overrides truth, morality and incorruptibility

Aug 26, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
This has happened before; specifically from 1964 to 1992. It is happening again; from 1992 to present.
The phenomenon is simple; a major ethnic group in this nation gets power and forgets or ditches its moral compass.
The very same people who frequented churches, temples and mosques while powerless laying claim to devotion, who lay down strict codes of moral rectitude for their own and children’s conduct.
It then happens these same people turn a blind eye to justify or participate in the atrocities, unfair acts and egregious conduct committed by their own ethnic group in power.
The constant maximisation of waste, inefficiency and corruption are dismissed or excused simply because the executors are of their ethnic group. It is some form of power-induced amnesia. Many justify it under the “we time now” banner.
We have a big fat stinking problem in this country. The problem is with Guyanese people jettisoning their morality for race-based power and ethnic aggrandizement.
When the PNC was raping and destroying this country from 1964 to 1992 Indian-Guyanese claimed a moral superiority. Now the PPP is raping this nation African-Guyanese claim moral superiority. But where were/are these two groups and their moral superiority when monsters prowl.
They couldn’t be found because they were busy running around with their race cards celebrating their newfound ‘we time’.
They were busy watching wrongdoing run wild while they stood silent because the wrongdoer is one of theirs.
Race consumes this nation. There is serious fear at play. Many Indians under the PPP and Africans under the PNC somehow believe they cannot respectively condemn an Indian or African political thief while they are in power because such public castigation for some bizarre reason helps the other ethnic group by weakening their ethnic group.
Their puppet masters use fear to achieve this. You must not publicly undress Comrade X as a thief because the other group will see him as a thief and most critically, will see the party as a safe haven for thieves thereby weakening the party.
In this nation of hypocrites, the political conmen have defined and trapped the morality of the ethnic masses they patrol.
The claims of integrity, truth, incorruptibility, dignity and decency amidst the various carnage of this nation are bogus. Nobody says don’t vote for your own political party. As reprehensible as it is, nobody could prevent you from voting from your own race-based party. A vote is not a vow of silence.
You can be honest and moral enough to expose the corrupt and wrong within your political party. Or fearlessly tell the truth about the excesses of those of your own race holding political power.
Don’t hide behind race and hypocrisy and then run to America, Canada, the Caribbean and Europe when you can’t take the corruption, waste, bureaucracy and unfairness from your own government elected by your hand marking your X anymore. Condemnation does not have to be shouting from the rooftops. It can be using your vote to condemn those who shame your race.
All that vowing after 28 years and 18 years respectively in the wilderness that you cannot become this beast goes right out the window as soon as the power arrives and the money starts dangling.
All those promises made in hard oaths to God, souls of dead mothers and life of young children are broken. The moral fabric of this nation cannot be repaired unless wrong is seen as wrong regardless of who is in power. Until the ability to see wrong for wrong and not within the prison of race, this nation is doomed.
For the greatest choke-and-rob in this nation is not the man lurking in the shadows with a blade but the blade lurking in the hands of your mind. It constantly chokes and robs you of truth, morality, integrity and incorruptibility. For every vote you give to a thief or a morally bankrupt individual, you have choked and robbed your children of their future. They will eventually arrive at an intersection of life in this nation where Colombia and Mexico will come to mind.
There are those who tell us that to tell the truth is traitorous to our own people. They happen to be a handful of men driving Prados, living in mansions, sipping chardonnay, smoking fine cigars, parading with virile young women and stuffing overseas bank accounts or buying properties abroad in places where you want to run to in order to toil for a living.
These men have been around since the1960s. You must stay quiet so they could enjoy the finer things of life. Ride roughshod over me with that new Prado. I will not utter a peep. I will stay silent as your friends rumble past with their new hulking trucks bought with new contract money because you and your friends are of my ethnicity. I need another gallon of that Kool-Aid you have given me that I could stand in my rags in the rain and point to one of my race driving by in a brand spanking new Prado and say that is real progress and development. That somehow because another person of my race is unfairly enriched by you I am enriched vicariously. Yes, that I am rich because a cabal of people are rich.
The people of this nation shall reap what they sow. The genie is out of the bottle. Those who really benefit are very few. The vast majority of Indian-Guyanese under the PPP struggle every day. The government they voted for gave US$15.4 million of their sweat, blood and tears to foreigner. Similarly, the GPC and Sanata Textile Mills were sold at basement bargain prices to a foreigner. A foreigner comes in and forms a construction company and gets some of this nation’s biggest contracts since 1992. But hush, don’t speak. Both of these groups somehow forget their actions in furthering this pillage. Hiding behind race like rats in an eternal hole.
At least some Africans got the gumption to say enough is enough when Walter Rodney rode into town. I am waiting on those Indians with their exercise in gumption. The bogeyman PNC is in the grave. The AFC is still floundering. Their time to make their moral statement is now. That said, at some point in this godforsaken nation of ethnic nabobs some truth has to emerge. Because if it doesn’t this 83,000 squares miles is going to be smashed beyond recognition. Or better yet the Brazilians, Chinese and others will come right in and take it while we are consumed with plunging daggers into each others’ backs. Too many in this nation just can’t handle the truth.
Michael Maxwell

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