Latest update March 25th, 2025 7:08 AM
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- Surinamese invest US$516M into country’s first oil project
- ExxonMobil impact study for Hammerhead project silent on likely explosion from new pipeline
- ‘A shocking breach’: Trump officials leak military attacks to The Atlantic
- Pensioner goes missing during creek outing at Kwakwani
- Cuban national jailed for entering Guyana illegally
Independence
Freedom! Freedom is here, but freedom from what? The yoke of former colonial masters, maybe. Freedom from the narrowness that hobbles a 
mightily blessed land? Or the confines that retard potential and people? Another story that is.
Freedom is another word for those with nothing to lose. Thus, there is the freedom to experiment with truth, to dissemble through motives that are sometimes not wholesome. Self-sabotaging.
Freedom is a double-edged as obvious from some undermining liberties lived in Guyana. For some uncontrolled freedoms seized here have led to the degradation and enslavement of individual, community, and society.
Genies have flowed from bottles with unintended consequences: narcotics and money laundering. This is the face of the new slavery; the ships and whips and chains of new masters.
Freedom to dream is here, too. It is a big, expansive, and the sweetest of unmatched dreams. This can be compressed into the majesty and electricity of a single mono-syllabic word: oil. Large lakes of oil slosh around underwater; there is a very tiny number of people around which to spread that huge bounty.
It should touch all (all) the citizens of this starved, pained land. This could go a far way. The oil is impatient to be freed from its natural restraints; the people are even more passionately impatient.
Freedom to dream about this vast oil blessing must be accompanied by the sister freedom to participate in the sharing through fair and equitable distribution. So much discovered. So much sensitive to the machinations of the mind. So much to tempt the calculating, the deceiving, and then the grabbing.
For as regards the latter, it is easy to think of, then embark upon, and last convert dreams into nightmares; the blessings into the worst of curses.
There is that kind of freedom, too, (distorted and crippling mostly) that must be monitored unendingly and leashed ever so tightly. This comes from the freedom to access power, the freedom to share in power, the freedom to taste the nectars of this gushing patrimony.
Freedom to support is what this means. To support and identify with any political group or vision; it comes with one limiting nonnegotiable caveat: that group, that vision must be national in scope as to intention, embrace, and practice.
And in so doing, there must be the freedom from stigma, from demonization and the marginalization that cascades with such vicious stings. In sum, there must be freedom from social and racial excommunications.
Freedom to find recognition and acceptance; and the enhancing inclusivity that is powered by merit, hard-earned record, confirmed ability, and the undeniable persuasions of promise. It cannot be any longer that freedom which is selective, sparse, and slick in its absence of abundant diversity, of good intentions, of greater goodwill.
This is freedom; freedom of entry that is neither imaginary nor deceptive. It cannot be of the variety that limits through invisibility and the unuttered as to who can apply and who are allowed.
Freedom from fear: The working poor, the honest salts apprehensive about the next meal; next expense coming; next burden that can’t be carried. They are the walking stiffs, who must scale the treacherous slopes of daily Guyanese existence.
Freedom from another fear is needed: from the many advancing on the city streets and in rural villages with heinous intents; and from those seemingly lily-white commercial and professional and ecclesiastical characters who practice a different kind of predation on the innocent and naïve.
Freedom to dissent. It is a symbol of newfound and growing power, the maturity and confidence in the liberty to express the caustic, idealistic, and patriotic. It is healthy. It is freedom to be treasured, this reality of freedom of conscience, even allowing for warped ones.
Free Guyana! Free self first.
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