A wretched state

Mar 11, 2020 Editorial

There is a national holiday that is usually of widespread family and community cheer, and it has all the fizz of concentrated grapefruit juice: flat but sharply acidic, scorching to some constitutions, bitter to rejecting palate and psychologically battered personage.
In this climate, there is nothing national about this holiday, even partisan and parochial celebration is enfeebled and signals the wasting of our precious time, the undivided priorities of our energies.
It is that kind of time today in Guyana, and it promises to remain so unchanging and uncaring on the day after today, and the others that follow. What hope can there be to explore the vast promise that lies before us?
There are only the sounds of our domestic abuses and diseases now metastasized to a national scale. It is the dreadful state of this wretched state where nothing else matters.
Nothing else matters. For there is a sickness–frightening and fatal–that sweeps across the globe, that has impacted severely many advanced societies and claimed many victims. It draws alarmingly and perilously near, it is just outside our many borders, and we are not bothered.
We have neither time nor interest. To be blunt, we do not have a care for such mundane things of the world, that scares the rest of the world into borderline panics in some overwhelming instances. And yet we are as unruffled and unheeding as a perpetual drunk lost in the deepest of hazes.
Elections are our drink of choice, our enduring narcotics fix to be repeated day after day, and by the hour, as needed. Well, now the fixes of elections developments and elections ebbs and flows–be such from media or courts or rumour–furnish the crutches on which we, as double amputees, lean on and live on for the next step forward. There is nothing else.
Sooner than later, we are going to have to come down from this incomprehensible, senseless, self-destructive high and face reality. We are going to be forced to face the reality of our circumstances, the holes that we keep digging for ourselves, and into which we tumble blindly, drunkenly, unconsciously. The long, lost weekend is going to be over and we had better be ready for what comes: the terrible withdrawal, the unbelievable agonies that await us when we emerge from our deep funk.
We are going to have to wake up and recognise that we have to live with one another, next to one another, and with the pungent truths and revealing deformities that are an inseparable part of our coexistence.
It is the most simmering of distorted coexistences. After all the flights of adrenaline, the voicing of venom and vehemence, we remain fastened inextricably in the stickiest of places: unlearning, untroubled, and unwise to the unthinking cores of our increasingly unpromising convergences of circumstances.
Oil prices, now below breakeven, remind of the fragility of wealth; even that fails to stir.
This is the dreadful state of this wretched state.
We have journeyed a long time and a long way to get nowhere–nowhere as a nation, nowhere as a people united towards a single destiny. We are not even a tale of two peoples anymore. We are a tale of two tragedies and their accompanying torments.
The solutions are right before us: not one alone, but many shoulders devoted to the heavy duties of national designing and national building.
We need statesmen of a singular calibre and we need them now. What we have, rather regrettably, are selfish and ambitious men, who are unable and unwilling to break out of their old molds, who are trapped by narrow partisan visions, and who compel all of us to consent to being dragged along in their voyages of the self-defeating.
We go along willingly in our respective tribal camps, for this is all we have, all we have ever known. Now it is all that we desire with the most fevered intensities. This is decimating us, making fools of all of us. Unless we commit to healing ourselves cold turkey, then today will be like yesterday with tomorrow the same with the same shakes and the same fixes craved.
This is the dreadful state of our wretched state.

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