Guyana must search its soul

May 19, 2019 Editorial

All the signs indicate that this country will soon go on a different footing; that there is going to be head-spinning, stomach-quivering, and gut-clenching. There is both good and bad in the works; the problem is that even the good may not be looked upon as such by stressed, fatigued citizens.
First the not so comforting tidings: the social seas ahead are predicted to be most agitated and stormy. It is the convulsions of a nation not knowing how to heal itself; and with impassioned, prejudiced souls striving for political (and racial) supremacy.
Everything else gets lost in that unmoving, most fateful of priorities. The CCJ might bring some guidance; but final panacea it is not. The floodgates promise to open the moment the CCJ speaks.
At that hour, Guyana will revert to its usual state.
It is the same state contained in one of the more pungent religious rebuttals to the teachings of evolutionist, Charles Darwin; of one“filled with the chatter of apes, the hiss of serpents, and the croak of frogs” now mutated unrecognizably.
That was the pious putdown, from a Brooklyn church, by a 19th century parson named Talmadge. With due deference to 21st century political correctness, this embodies the domestic political universe. Guyana today is that Hobbesian hell where there is “war of all against all.”
The temporary interlude facilitated by the CCJ could turn out to be the equivalent of hiding behind cigarette smoke: a fig leaf thin and feathery.
Guyanese would do well to imagine the condescending chuckles around the regional cocktail circuits among the more reserved and polite. And at the harsher end of the spectrum, they should cringe, even though they hear not the slurs as to the incapacity of the now aptly named ‘mudheads’ in “BeeGee.” They can’t get anything right; they are just a people, forlorn and pathetic, without the wisdom and pride and will to solve their own problems.
For this country to get anywhere, all Guyanese must look at themselves and come to that place where St Augustine found himself: “I probed the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it.” Unless this country humbles itself as to its raw truths, then it will keep going around in circles, and at lower and lower depths.
Somehow there must be found patriots in this society to observe and to re-envision the local world through a wider frame. There must be willingness to look at where the nation languishes coldly and unsparingly; weigh everything dispassionately: the syntheses of differences.
This could lead to improvement for a greater many, and not the lesser fraction. This would represent the height of political intelligence. Each of the major political parties, their leaders, and people think that they and they alone, possess the answers and visions for tomorrow.
National history exposes the impoverishment of those positions. All either party has ever done is get by for a time, for the fewer, for the worst.
Nothing emphasizes this more than governance of this broken and failed society: a society from which people flee uninterruptedly; where political stewards are so lacking that they themselves are compelled to flee to the sanctuary of the CCJ.
For legal solace and cover, for perpetuation of political myths; for all the knowing in Guyana, there is still rejecting of knowing those primary elements that could remove from social life support, and give an opportunity, a long moment of rehabilitation and collective reinvigoration.
In 1861, the Prime Minister of Piedmont, Massimo d’Azegliosaid, “We have created Italy, now we must create Italians.”
A Guyana of sorts was created decades ago; now it is time to create Guyanese (not hyphenated ones).

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