A welcoming admission of wrong

Oct 06, 2019 Editorial

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The fallout from the Stabroek News ads curtailment brings us to a strange, but welcomed, place. It is encouraging to hear of admission of wrong. If authentic, then it cannot be the only one.
This cannot be the convenience of piling-on an opponent, the expediency and hypocrisy of today. Still, it’s a start.
There are other areas that call for some admission first, followed by genuine rehabilitation. The terribly grave assaults inflicted on enormously afflicted peoples, by government after government; from one era to the other is sickening, draining, decimating suffering for a blind and believing electorate.
Admission is pleasing to the ear, good for the absorption, and sells smoothly. What about the abuse and determined, consistent disdain exhibited for press persons and press entities?
This admission is, for whatever it is worth, a positive development. The Guyanese citizenry is owed much more; more than confession of the safe, the bland and nonthreatening, more than the timely and the tactical, more than the hastening to joining with the flowing streams of critiquing on the actions of today’s government.
Helpful about the deals, not made fully public, about the full story of those who benefited and those who were left to the dogs relative to Clico, about who were the cerebral craftsmen behind the triggermen who executed so many in the name of crimefighting, of freedom fighting, of jailbreaking, of drug trafficking, and of money laundering.
Admission of who opened the doors wide and let those felons and predators into the sheepfold could go powerfully. Who made many errors of misjudgment from day one, would go farther in helping this society to start somewhere to mend, to heal and to recover from its near terminal state.
The racial beasts spawned may be contained, given a chance for reasoning and wisdom, where major issues and priorities take center stage in contemplations and intentions.
More surprises come in a season of the sanctimonious. After all the dirtiness and dastardliness, there is now a call for a CoI into the death (an assassination, let all be reminded) of one Courtney Crum-Ewing. Even the current government, a supposed refuge of the clean for the clean, has balked. There are no angels around, but there is widespread political fear, as to where a serious inquiry could lead, whose names could be called, and what a truly open-ended probe into the political soul of Guyana could reveal. Thus, there has been strategizing and evading. That is, until now.
These things: CoIs into the sensitive and disputed; admission of error, and who knows what else lurks in the wings, possess a certain practiced air about them. Slip under the radar, go on record, play the game, collect the dividends of goodwill, of good faith. And since these are political creatures at work, there is the self-congratulation of good feeling.
For the societal to ascend, the political must be more than propaganda, the props of good marketing, the flavour of the day.
The critical is justified to question, if not condemn, the cunningness and calculatedness of it all. Numerous red herrings have been shared, much well-rehearsed jumping on the bandwagon of the moment to leverage for maximum political returns have occurred repeatedly.
It is the position of this publication that any positive development of any bona fide pedigree(no matter how minimal the degree and strain) from any political source must be more than a moment of mere acknowledging. Matters do not end there. That is simply the beginning.
Because for the peoples of this nation-all of them in their surly, rowdy, divided, discouraging and diminishing separateness and sameness–are due more. For this land to begin to take stock of where it is, matters have to rise way beyond the self-serving political. Regardless of who is the government. Regardless of who is the opposition. Matters must resonate and transcend beyond the political into the hostile, bitter realms of the social, the racial, the wholly environmental. To address those. By wanting to work for the betterment of those.
Taking political stock, identifying and specifying what is present and what is missing; what has failed and what has furrowed into frenzied paroxysms of fear for the future, for self, for others. That is true confession, the entirety of a nation desperately in need of redemption. For only then can there be thinking of growing, of daring the embarking on a truly new beginning.
The leaders of this country must will themselves to rise above lip service, the comforting, the momentary. All leaders must deliver the inspiring. Every one of our local political leaders have an obligation to deliver the credible.

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