Give me back my mind!

Jun 27, 2019 Letters

---

DEAR EDITOR,

Those who believe that racial ruction as in the past, is on the horizon anew for our Guyana are wrong! Try as any misguided Guyanese politician might, to inflame along racial lines, his/her efforts are doomed to failure. What is on the horizon is the rescinding of all, already signed oil contracts.
Right here in Lethem during our last Local Government Elections campaign, it was felt by some cock-sure people that one of the two largest parties, the PNC, ‘owned’ the people and could never lose here. But they lost!
Three years before they did win, seven to three on the Council. Three years later, they lost six to four. Racial politics is giving way to the power of the pocket, and so it should. Ask the Police and Soldier women and men who declined the invitation to vote by race at those same LG Elections.
We are a GOD believing people. Two maxims are therefore relevant and worthy of note: the first is about GOD, the second about economics: The opposite of faith is not doubt, it is certainty. And: Workers of all races lives are hard, while the few of all races live sweet.
Guyanese working people are taking back their minds. I hit a nerve on the Platform in Lethem when I shouted: “Guh meh back meh mind!”
As I explained to my brothers and sisters, that: “You already know all that I am saying, the only thing is, you don’t know that you know”. This message reverberated, as I explained that a wall has been built in our minds by a centuries old bombardment of lies, to hide away the everyday half of our minds from the other half; a bombardment that harps on the rich and the poor to make us think that it must and will always be so. Nothing of the sort!
The world is changing for the better for the many, but not for the few. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1962 in England introduced a new capitalism I call Modified Capitalism. Under the economics of Modified Capitalism, living standards of the many in the U.K grew, paid for by a progressive taxation policy that taxed the massive unearned incomes of the few – ninety-eight percent, in many cases.
Today, there are two capitalisms: Modified Capitalism and Capitalism of Plunder. The latter, wants peoples’ resources for free, but workers in every country are getting vexed. That’s why the noticeable shivering and shaking on GOD’s earth.
Let it not scare us though! It is nothing but an economic shake-up as took place when Feudalism gave way to Capitalism a few hundred years ago. It is just such another ideological morphing taking place.
As there are two Capitalisms today, so there are two groups of the few. One group is largely outside of most Third World countries. These are the ninety or so billionaires who control the dissemination of nearly all world news that give us a distorted view of the world where they are always winning, over China, Russia, India, Africa and most other countries. But they are not!
These billionaires, these ‘C’s and ‘D’s, search the universities employing some of our brightest ‘A’s to programme our minds with rubbish. The billionaires then boast of their billions of unearned income. But alas, in every single country of the world, we, the many, are catching on.
Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney refused to sell out the rest of us. Others did; sell us out to the few.
It is true that business people with ‘soul’ should get a little more for their efficiency that all of us need. Not too much more though, or they’ll copy the lazy billionaires insane greed. Workers are demanding change because of that greed by the few.
This Guyana belongs to all of us. A few here have used the racial thing so that we’ll take what they do to us. We are thousands to one, but we have no media. That’s how they bamboozle us.
Rarely, do we find a privately owned media house owned by one man like Glenn Lall who will publish the views of all sides. Kudos to him!
New priorities to serve the interest of the many, and real, genuine and long jail time for the corrupt are getting clearer and closer.
Via our oil, every eager and able adult must go to University, free!
Modified Capitalism means workers must also have good money in the bank. To this end, we are prepared to share with the Exxon Mobil’s, a real fifty- fifty split, but we are not prepared to be made poorer than we already are!
Every day, in the Kaieteur News in particular, another fair minded person tells us something brand new and horrible about the contract that Granger/Trotman signed with ExxonMobil, a company that specialises in Capitalism of Plunder.
Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi freed minds. They did not want workers to remain blind. The billionaires know that with drugs, crime, porn and other deliberate distractions, we cannot see through them all. We are too busy with hard work. That is how countries like ours with oil end up with workers’ bad living standards falling even further, with worse social conditions to boot.
Slave sugar, bauxite, gold and now oil, it is time we take back our minds.
That contract Granger/Trotman signed with Exxon Mobil is illegal. Their “massa” needed to use only a little piece of bait. The oil is ours, but they do not care about our fate.
No more dividing us by race. Indeed, the PNC already see Sir – that this same Guyana is going to emancipate more of our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean and elsewhere than just ourselves.
Africa is bleeding oil and gas, and we are not to check how much of our oil will be going fast. Inflated bills will be more eye-pass, and those who signed that contract think we are all collectively, nothing but a jackass.

Yours truly,
Eddie DaSilva

---

---