Latest update January 23rd, 2025 7:40 AM
June 18 in nigh
It is the end of the road. All appeals to foreign minds and foreign places for interpretation, for counsel, are over. The many rivers ahead to cross are now all internal. Is Guyana up to this? To hurdle the summits of visions that swirl, despite their being made precarious and treacherous by slick, enchanting oil?
It is the same oil, which in its viscosity now entraps and drives men to madness. What will it become Tuesday? Beyond Tuesday?
Even the winners, if there is any such thing, should be sober as to ecstasy and revelry. Victory at the CCJ means nothing, other than prolonging paralysis through resuming the ancient agonies. Guyanese had better get some sense: leaders, supporters, adversaries, neutrals, citizens all, for everyone has a dog in this fight.
The dog is oneself, by the mere fact of being here, whether interested or not, attached or not, involved or not. The clock that was frozen already has the telltale sweat of thawing, of the wound-up springs finding excruciating release. It ticks loudly, remorselessly. The countdown has begun.
The fevered hysterical scrambles to hurl toward the finish line. It is near; but there are eternities of time and traumas interfering with that tantalizing nearness. It is past the hour of learning. All that is left is the growing in the painful aging of the old.
Leading men have decided that they are ready, confident in the reach and power of their preparations, their assets. The only obstacles are within; outsiders will maintain distance in the reckonings ahead: democracy and process must be followed.
There are those fateful words –democracy and democratic processes. The first problem is that Guyanese do not know what to do with them, to make them work in their most expansive profundities and trajectories. The results are the impasses that flow from doggedness; the searing passions that abandon reasoning; and the calculated visions that beggar wisdom.
The second problem is best expressed through a definition offered by an American sage over two hundred years ago that is so apt, so fitting to the circumstances of Guyana. It was Benjamin Franklin, who said that democracy is “two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for lunch.”
Lunch is served; the sirloin is of the willing. For every thinking and wise Guyanese there is no juicy humor in that; only the stark straits in which citizens and country are locked; locked feebly, addictively, and hopelessly.
For when all is said and done, argued and avoided, the same voting citizens are the ones who end up on the luncheon platter naked and helpless. Hopeless, too. Forlorn and hopeless, because the two wolves have only one idea in the head: who gets to strip and gnaw and savor the body and bones of a self-imprisoning electorate.
It is not a digestible set of circumstances for those unready for the chewing, followed by the usual spitting and excreting. It comes soon.
On Tuesday, the CCJ will come with its gifts for Guyanese. Guyanese should beware. For thence, it is back to the crucible of the cauldron. The political no man’s land of all is mine. Except that it isn’t. There is nowhere to go. None left to turn to; none left to listen to the misery that is this country. None left to decide and hand down.
After the first stormy interludes of no-confidence and constitutional writ and ANUG (and the rest) and the impatient wait for the CCJ, the phony tranquility is about to rupture.
Tuesday, June 18, cometh. So, Guyanese goeth.
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