All must manage themselves better

Sep 22, 2019 Editorial

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There were powerful voices at work last Thursday. Each spoke a different language. Things got rough in places, though it should not be around elections time.
Thursday came with blanketing showers of protest. They did not intensify into the torrential nor tempestuous. Not yet. But by no measure could the protest action be called controlled or well-managed. Stage-managed for the bright spotlight of maximum publicity, yes; even well-thought-out and well-produced; but well-managed, no.
Protest is a right; but it comes with responsibility, the first of which is a regard for the rights of others. To assemble. To speak freely. To offer positions that are the opposite of everything stood for or believed.
Because, if there is no respect for the rights of others, then that shoe transfers and fits all too easily on the foot of disagreeing and disagreeable adversaries. Thus, would commence an endless round of accusations: what started it? Who was disrespectful? Who intended violence?
Given the long – sometimes ugly – world of protest and counter protest in Guyana, it is a double-edged sword. It is one that has been waved menacingly in the faces of one another in the other emotionally-charged times.
Let’s learn from Thursday and commit to not going there by managing ourselves better.
Because in the fevers of elections, there is no telling where these things can lead; how quickly they can get uncontrolled. We have had that before, too. This publication is urging the opposing parties to keep it civilised by keeping things on an even keel. Twist and shout, heckle aloud, even sing, however raucously, but those should be the limits of peripheries not crossed.
Because tomorrow – whatever it brings, whenever it arrives – holds forth the starkness of a special shade of darkness that envelops this society. There is only thick gloom to it. We have been there before; we should have learned enough to not want to go there again.
Because from the perspective of this publication, this gives way too easily to the inevitable. That would be the clashes that take to a single place: down. This nation has been down so long, it finally has an opportunity to get up. We say to all groups, all Guyanese: let it get up. Let us get up.
Some powerfully and influential diplomats may have thought that they were helping this nation to do just that: get up. They were not. Sections of the diplomatic corps – in tandem, a crucial one – rather surprisingly added their own jarring notes to the heaving atmospherics of Thursday. Out of the inky blue, there was the discordant, and in the most uncharacteristic fashion. It was out of place, out of tune, and out of line.
No matter how well-intentioned, what was said should come across to all Guyanese as demeaning. For sovereign nations are not delivered ultimatums. No matter the qualifying conditioners and qualifiers, “We therefore call on the President to set an elections date immediately…” startles like a gunshot close to the ear.
It is because “Immediately” does not come across well in public. It sets teeth on edge. As if not contented with that fist in the face, there was the warning (to put mildly) of “it hinders our ability to support.” That complicates matters and provides grounds for much political conjecture, none of it positive. In view of the extremely sensitive and precarious place at which Guyana currently is perched, its citizens should have been spared those insensitivities.
Though not blameless in the oppressive tensions from all sides leading up to Thursday, the president broke new ground before the private sector gathering. He took the lead to offer a promise of recognition of elections results. That is reassuring, as far as it goes. It is comforting that one leader has ventured to set an example of civility through the personal capital of commitment; it follows from his statements about Gecom. This paper hopes that there will be reciprocal toning down of instigations and veiled threats.
Because there must be revolutionary rethinking of what brought us to where we are, and what is vitally necessary to get us up and out of here. Any place but the here of today. For here we are trapped and agonizing, but still breathing the fires of hatreds and divisions.
What hope is there? What hope can there be? Be it November or March, this much must be faced: this nation cannot go on as a nation in the way that it is, in the shape that it is, and in the distorted visions of its gnarled soul. Because in so many respects, Guyana has abandoned, if not disowned, the moorings that make a nation.
Here is a society that has reduced itself to revealing the bitter dregs in us before each other and an astonished world. Harmony and unity represent an afterthought; indeed, no thought at all spared for what that could mean.
Because whether November or March, or any other time, elections solve nothing. Repeat: absolutely nothing. There is only the unchanging about us, even if the baton of governance has passed. It would be yet another iteration of the ancient status quo. There is nothing different about that or us: that is not the way of a real nation; one with some semblance of a destiny. This is where we stand. To that is where we go. This can’t be all that we have left in us. This must not be the Guyana beyond elections.

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