Latest update February 10th, 2025 2:25 PM
That sacrifice is needed
This country is in dire need of those sons and daughters, those leaders and servers, those powerful and less fortunate to be self-sacrificing. What happened today, some two thousand years ago on a forlorn, dismal hilltop in a backwater province of the sprawling Roman Empire provides a model, a standard for all of us Guyanese to aspire to, and then to deliver.
Whether skeptic or agnostic, believer or nonbeliever, there is this pulse pounding drama of that first Good Friday that comes alive today across the globe. Whether embraced as sacred truth, or dismissed as and distanced from as an enchanting fable, there is this literary record of something special that is believed by the faithful to have occurred in that most obscure of dead ends.
Over a billion souls across the globe can proudly or humbly trace the mysteries and mysticisms of their blind obedience to that rather frail, but resonant beginning from nowhere by a nobody —a poor village carpenter’s son.
For that billion and more, this supposedly Greatest Story Ever Told, and its surging, awesome climax is not of the literary, but to be embraced as truly, purely, and absolutely literal. It happened then; it is happening now. It was all about the self-sacrificing.
Where are Guyanese in this regard? Where are those patriots whose umbilical cords are wrapped and inseparably sewn into the fabric of the Guyanese soul? Where coming back is about giving? Where staying and ascending does not decay to the nauseating and enfeebling insistence on the self-serving?
Leaders in every realm–political, social, ecclesiastical, commercial, and professional–must start by reflecting (whether believer or not) on the man from Galilee suspended by the cruel shafts of nails on that Cross, and ask of themselves: do I measure up? Am I imitating? Have I exemplified?
The Guyanese gospel stands as a register of atrocity, iniquity, and boundaryless hypocrisy. From presidents to paupers, it is an impious litany of political Pharisees, who lead the charge in words that weigh heavily and which incite to piercing; and ever after to the soullessness that is the Guyana of today.
There is this unholy scrambling for position and the perquisites that cascade from such ambitions and achievements. And then there is a population of the lost sheep of this country thrown to and preyed upon by the stalking wolves in a dehumanizing Darwinian tussle for survival, the upper hand, and perpetuation.
On this Friday of extraordinary grace, of unparalleled portents, where are those Guyanese figures, men and women, who are not of the angling and clawing and climbing of the crab barrel that has condemned this society to its destitution of vision? Where are they?
It just could be that they are preoccupied with counting the pickings, as well as planning on how to be well-positioned for future counting from future pickings? As this country is drained to the bone, and diminished in spirit from the routines of roguery, a dozen or eleven is needed as never before to dedicate mind and muscle to making this loved land a better place.
Out of a gritty, uninspiring back alley of darkness and nothing, a no man’s land of nonentities, came a figure for the Ages. There were a dozen willing hearts, and then one turned. Guyana can afford one (or two or seven) of such hearts turning. It cannot overcome eleven against and only one or two standing for what is progressive.
Not with oil, not with race, not with the relentless pursuit of cash of any kind, at all costs, by any means.
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