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A dedicated task
“The mother of Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz has turned her life into a shrine to his memory” (New York Post October 13). Junior was a teenager mistakenly identified, hunted down, and cold-bloodedly butchered in numerous murderous cutlass strikes in the Bronx.
The walls in Leandra Feliz’s Bronx home are a mosaic of her fallen son’s image. It adorns her clothing, her pillow and bed quilt. Pieces of apparel are framed on a hallway wall. Even in the bathroom his picture lives.
“Everywhere, everywhere he is with me, in my heart, 24/7.” It is testimony to a mother’s love, standing for her dead son.
What do we stand for here? Live for? Dedicate our lives towards in this troubled, depraved, self-destructive society? For a great many, the be all and end all, is to maintain the ascendancy of their race in the power structure.
For an almost equivalent multitude, it is the about figuring out, calculating, and committing everything to getting back in power. To be sure, there are the few manifesting the same heartfelt devotion to such altruisms as diabetes assistance, cancer relief, educational uplift, poverty reduction. They are too far apart, no matter how many diverse fields of noble endeavours are attempted, too few.
Vast ferocious swarms blight the horizon and torture the vision: the uppermost interest for most is about the tribe, the related politics, and the fanatical drive for power; power by any expediency. Power means control, means money, means all the woes lived and feared.
Principle is sacrificed, conscience shredded, judgment discarded in the unalterable convictions that this is what must be; and, when the storms and eruptions have stilled, that only can be, then this society is doomed.
For there is shortcoming in such thinking. Many of them.
For despite the turbulences in the breasts, Guyanese are never, ever, truly stilled. Look carefully, and there are the undercurrents rippling. It is savaging to the sight, sore to the slightest of touches, and recoiling in the shuddering and hating that it brings, thus, the bitter gall on the tongue of those who fail, who lose.
Second, it is because the convictions of strivers and winners and losers are in the wrong places, through the wrong priorities, that flow from the wrong priorities. Since it is about the winners alone, then there will always be losers.
Even in a near homogenous society, there will still be those who feel cheated and disenfranchised, as well as marginalised and penalised. Colour of skin gives way to that of class in the arrangement of station in the rungs of society.
And Guyana is nowhere near a homogenous society. Plural may not be the most appropriate of words, the particular one which captures the sulfuric essences of the rawness, shabbiness, and coarseness of a gathering of different peoples that recognise only the sharpness of differences.
Acceptance and embrace across the board of only that, too. Where in our society are our people dedicated to raising voice and spirit, to straining strength and intellect against the serpents that envenom the children, while slithering effortlessly across the environment?
Where is that fierce unrelenting force field of personal powers brought to bear to exemplify: not this way, not like that, not again, not anymore?
Third, the tempests never settle into full stillness for there is only the customary strident denial of and furious objection to, all just placed before consciousness and reason. That is what is the life devotion of most here.
There is still implacable refusal to listen to, or contemplate, or make allowance for the merest sliver of consideration of another way.
It is the culture cultivated and perpetuated in lifelong embrace. Another way, a radically different one, is arguably the only way, which could usher past the threshold to all the other ways never given a bona fide opportunity to take root, only to take root.
A woman in the Bronx lost a beloved in a horror, and her life is of the one-track.
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