An Introspection: 2018-2019

Jan 16, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

As a late octogenarian, one simply could not help but ponder on the range of:
 analyses
 evocations
 postulations
 equivocations
 and more,
even provocations, that would have deluged thinking, emotions since that fateful day of December 21, 2018 in the history of Guyana – all in the name of loving one’s country.
Those of us who have lived before, and since Independence, would have experienced too many (mostly) political vicissitudes, and whether private or public sector, our respective DNA’s drove us principally to ‘play to our base’ – a thought process, which not unjustifiably, which sought to confirm our respective validities – ethnic, cultural, religious, economic, and otherwise. In the meantime, we valued ‘the other base’ through the prisms of our historical limitations, all of which, if we were not unconscious, we preferred.
Nearly two centuries after, we are more than ONE People. Indeed, we remain at minimum Six (and a half) Peoples.
In 2019, we are all privately and publicly insisting, that the counter-productive past is our retrospective future.
Too few extrapolate from this constipation of psyche that we have learnt nothing, or too little, from our experiences. So we sit, stand, in the varying sizes of our mental compartments and applaud ourselves as role models, forgetting to ask our children what they think, how they feel, which school they prefer to attend, what would be their professional choice.
Hardly ever is the choice of sport discussed. This is left to an almost exclusive few to decide. So that, there is no pervasive culture of team spirit – even rugby and football teams carry different images from cricket teams.
So while teamsmanship is not the norm, winning is a celebrated pre-requisite – even at school exams.
Guyana indeed lives up to its depictor as ‘Land of Many Waters’ – in which we are floating against tides, while not teaching our children how to swim well enough to save one another when it floods.
Come 2019 the flood is caused, not by the normal rainy weather, but rises from a turbulence of emotions, antagonisms and divisions, against which the adults have no protective gear to offer their children.
So is it not time that these recalcitrants ask of their children what is better for them, how they would wish to see their future, their country shaped? It is not a matter for a majority debate.
More critically, it is time for parents to find out whether the generations they spawn have confidence in them.
Who is it that said, “It is time that we all move from a playing field overgrown with infertile antagonisms, onto a pitch where we can practise playing forward as a team”?

Yours faithfully
E.B. John

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