The elevator revelation

Oct 03, 2019 Editorial

If one elevator could cause us so much trouble, then the future looks most unpromising. If one airport exposes the perverse ways of doing business in this country, by government after overlapping government, then we are in more of a hole than we know.
And if one election can come to represent such a life and death undertaking, then maybe we are not worth the air that we breathe. It is because if these things are giving us so much trouble, then there is the high probability that a world of failure awaits on the other things that beg for attention and the singular visions that determine where we go, and how we will be.
The ‘we’ in all of this would be we the people. We who, in one depressing, inglorious season after another, line up to anoint those who promise to lead us to some kind of Promised Land, only for them to deliver to the gates of purgatory.
If we can’t get an elevator right after stops and stalls and suspensions, and almost nothing else, for some 365 longdays, then what can we get right? The idea of nation-building comes to mind. Merely the smattering of an idea, where warring races could be wooed and motivated and attracted to seeing the light that comes from harmony.
Where are the people committed to such movement? Where are the leaders who are engaged in such a back-breaking, spirit curdling undertaking? Who are genuinely enmeshed and engrossed in bringing the hostile, far apart ends together by patient bridging, in an inspiring and intrepid vision of what could be? For anything remotely approaching thinking of the oneness of a blended voice, the singleness of an inseparable body, and the moving spirit of a national force field overpowering everything and everyone in its path, there must be those willing to invest all.
We gave them a country, we trusted them with our destiny, and all we did get in return, is the standing record of folly and catastrophe, and only tragedy after self-defeating tragedy. Look at that elevator! We don’t have to, because it laughs at us and mocks us in the unending farces heaped upon the peoples of this land.
It stands as a monument to futility, so much wasted currency, and misplaced energy. We need an elevator and we start out with people who, from all appearances, are better suited to being minibus conductors. They are more equipped to deal with the mundane and manual undertaking of giving a hand up and a foot down from the pedestrian height of a low-slung passenger bus.
Why do these things have to be testimonials to the inefficiency, insipidity, and indecency of those who seek our votes, only for them to turn around and join forces with barbarians bent on selling us down the river?
There is that airport. That cannot be about engineering expertise. Clearly, it is about some wicked experiment with the hapless Guyanese taxpayer dollar used and misused to deliver one abomination following the other. It is either this does not work, or the other working for a time only, or in still other instances, the workings of contractors committed to cheating citizens out of pocket and pride.
The current government blames the previous one, while the previous one stands on the sidelines, in the longstanding tradition of useless critics, to heckle and to hassle after every public failure and fallout. The concoction is supposed to be modern. The only thing modern about this must be the price and the pains still to come from its presence. Get these darned things moving, move the people out, stop tying bundles with those who come to plunder this country.
There is zero likelihood of that happening, since the local predators are partners in the crimes committed.
Then there is the elections mangling. This one is all local. It is bigger than the existential border matter, bigger than all the oil discoveries, bigger than the fate of this nation. Because the winner gets to rule the roost and build more elevators and airports like the ones causing so much embarrassments now.