Leaders and supporters must do more

Mar 08, 2020 Editorial

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Our political leaders and our political parties need to do much more than what they have limited themselves and contented themselves to doing at present. The calls for calm and to stay off the streets are a start. Much more has to be done and in the tangible ways needed right now.
Our political leaders should not satisfy themselves with leading from a distance, from the out of reach places of microphones and television studios. Political leaders and senior comrades need to come out and fan out and limit themselves to encouraging supporters to go home and stay home.
It is the height of irresponsibility and senselessness to arrange these gatherings at this time, to marshal for whatever purpose, of which there could be none that is positive at this hour. All that is achieved is the thickest concentration of anger and seething resentments, with innocent and involved placed in harm’s way
Party seniors should be physically present to lend energies to dispersing assembled angry throngs. The greatest of care should be taken to ensure that appeals for calm and reason and sense to prevail not be misused as cover to insert some quick, convenient politicking for party while at it.
Those who know better must do better: stay away, stay indoors, and let the processes being pursued along different tracks be finalized.
This is a time that calls for the soberest and wisest and mildest of minds and voices. Nothing is proved, nothing is solved by being out in the street and attracting dangers or inciting and distributing them. We warn that mobs do not have minds, only the sweeping madness that takes firm hold and propel to all manner of mayhem.
And this brings us to that simple word named respect, the phrase respect for process, and it is not unrelated accompaniment, respect for neighbours and contemporaries. They all have to mean something beyond the shallow and empty.
They must not be easy figures of speech that roll off the tongue and the pen without meaning anything. It must not be still one more platitude that is merely about just that (a platitude), and which leads to all the calamities that weigh upon us heavily, and double us over mercilessly.
At present, we have dedicated energies towards mauling each mentally and psychologically on social media through a combination fact and rumour, menace and reciprocal raging. The videos and audios serve as swords and shields, be they from Berbice, Demerara, or Georgetown. A viable, progressive nation cannot be built upon such bedrocks.
Look closely and this is how our days are wasted away, through those utterances that are of some of the usual deceiving (and self-serving) verbal fare that lash at each other. We say we are quarreling and clashing about process, but that is not all. There is much more at stake, as in who gets to rule whom.
If we cannot commit to those ingredients that are about building together, then all we succeed in doing is destroying together. Quite candidly, the odds of building a progressive, respected, modern society have all but disappeared now.
And this despite the fact that now we are a petroleum people, and just cannot be the regular crude folks of old, but people with world class discoveries and world class potentials. So, when we struggle ferociously to perpetuate the old divisive and devastating ways of racial supremacy, then we get only to the places where we are now helplessly fastened.
Look at us: we are busy pouring acids and poisons on our festering sores, when we keep harbouring the grudges that have accumulated. We have just had-indeed, endured-yet another bruising, wounding elections season, that is still not fully over.
It cannot be, not when the virus rages uncontrolled within the breasts and leeches at our daily waking existence, as is now evident in our streets, and which leaves us in a worst state than before.
We wake and crawl out to a world that lies at our feet. And all we are interested in doing is kicking at each other.
It is said that to those to whom much has been granted, much expected. It is a restatement of the obvious to say that we have been given more than most other places. Thus, it goes without saying, also, that much more has to originate from us.
Much that is of the constructive as we strive to create consensus on a single people with a single destiny; much of the inspiring and up building as leaders and citizens reexamine selves and rededicate selves to delivering on our promise, by joining together to overcome what has haunted us, to conquer what has cursed us, and to master our time and space in a more authoritative and compelling manner.
We could make a serious start for the hard journeys that stretch in front of us, but only if genuine respect is inculcated within and amplified externally before all. Respect for institutions, respect for rules and procedures, respect for authorities, and respect and regard for all of our fellow citizens that is practiced on a reciprocal basis.
We do so and we give ourselves a chance. We are not doing so currently, when we bicker and blast each other over the way forward.
As we do so, we condemn ourselves to the severely disruptive situations that menace. When we proceed to the streets and roadways, we are not respecting anyone, but preparing to trample upon those who happen to be in our way, as we keep seeing and hearing.
No matter how well-intentioned we are, when we rush to and rail (or celebrate) in the streets, then we are signaling that whatever comes from whatever process had better be in our favor, or lese… And then what?

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