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The same two forces and a crippling malaise
Reports making the rounds note that political and electoral matters remain unchanged on the Guyanese scene. The thinking of the reasonable has been that, because of the sharp acrimonies and ugly embarrassments, which continue to torment local politics, and dispirit the conscientious, the opportunity and circumstance was ripe for movement. There has not been a scintilla of anything resembling such a sometimes yearned for development.
From pulpit to pasture, from city to countryside, and from schools of learning to schools of raucous dissent, there were great anxieties and wretchedness over the deplorable state of affairs in the political realm. The bitterness, the naked emotions, and the terrible weight placed on a bent over nation and its peoples all fostered great outrage. Wherever observed or examined – parliament, print media, social media, the social milieu, the stumps – it was the same descent into that which disturbs and deters. Nobody wanted to be close to the barbarisms, or part of them or so citizens said and postured, while it was nice to say.
A couple of groups rose to the moment and came out in the open: new political parties. A separate handful of the thoughtful and patriotic announced their arrivals: a new interest group here, a pressure group there, clusters of the caring and the patriotic. One would have thought that these newcomers would gain some traction, establish presence. They can barely attract any substantial audience, any sustained listening. The initial flickers of interest quickly faded into obscurity and doomed those new people to a similar fate, which was either dismissed as afterthoughts, ignored as out of place, rendered irrelevancies in the tumultuous surges of the sweeping coarseness of Guyanese politics.
After all the lamenting and crying and beating of breasts, there is the unchanging sameness of always. No hearing. No differentiating. No moving. Here is some food for thought: a chunk of concerned, objective, truly independent civil society votes in the right spaces could translate to two seats. Unfortunately, that chunk is the ash of a mirage; unavailable and not there. Not today. Maybe next time. There is only the unalterable fixity of the devastating and self-defeating: Race! Race politics! Race division! Race deformities! Race results!
After all the disgust and boiling anger at local politicians and local political brutishness, what does all of this say? It says one thing, and one thing only: that at the end of the day, Guyanese are enchanted and excited by what they condemn and curse. After all the talk, Guyanese are addicted to what has enslaved: the old politics, the old racial turmoil and vulnerabilities, and the old social traumas. Leaders and parties know this. They fuel it and fatten it; and then they feed on it. Where have all the supposedly rational and horrified disappeared?
Try searching for them and good luck finding those now elusive Guyanese. Look at them now: The same so-called sensible in the midst that bemoaned the divide; those same people who once shook heads in dismay, today identify spiritually and philosophically with the racial rancidness and cultivated racial calamities; that translates to unflagging support at the polls.
In statistics, it is called reversion to the mean. In Creolese: ‘Dawg like fuh suck egg’. There is an abundance of both. Thus, the carcass of a stricken, contemptible electorate remains to testify to the chronic sickliness that diminishes. The biggest hoax perpetrated in Guyana during elections times is not that which politicians play upon citizens. No! Only the one that an abused, numbed, and lost electorate plays upon itself.
For the skeptical, simply look at where things are today in late March and clearly, there are only two forces alive and at work in the political process; the same two. Today, the groups and new people stand as forlorn monuments to Guyanese futility. And Guyanese malaise, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Such is “the still sad music of humanity” (Wordsworth).
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