Nothing sits well with this ongoing tragedy

Mar 14, 2020 Editorial

The High Court ruling and whatever processes are followed leave the peoples of this split and fragmented country in a place where half is in ecstasy (or would be) and the other half in lifeless anguish.
Nothing sits well with this, as there is nothing that recommends itself for constructive, healthy, and peaceful continuation towards the effective governance of this society.
It is sure to be an angry, distrustful, and disillusioned nation of peoples at war with themselves, with cells, like cancer, bent on destroying all in sight.
This is where our leaders must step forward and manifest the maturity, sobriety, and responsibility towards the duty owed to all citizens. We repeat: all citizens.
Whenever and wherever the final processes and final count(s) lead, there is this unalterable, nonnegotiable truth: one group – a large set of citizens, that cast the ballot, would feel that it is, for all intents and purposes, disenfranchised. That having committed to and participated in the electoral process, the voice of its losing members is without weight, their presence irrelevant and lacking in meaning, and that their very existence is devoid of substance and nothing but dispiriting.
Caricom may work out a plaster, the international community a momentary respite. Then it is the sullen lull until the next time, since nothing is solved, nothing lasts. Our leaders set the tone.
The sharp and insistent, as well as calculated narratives of both remaining political groups have not aided the types and amounts of wise and patient thinking so necessary at this time. Instead, the many easy and convenient channels overflow with presentations for and against, which reinforce settled mindsets and fateful suspicions. There is almost nothing that contributes, in any form or fashion, to the kind of mental atmosphere and physical environment so desperately needed to examine matters in any other way but the sharply partisan and the terribly traumatic, for those few still engaged in the arena, who long for the space to ponder deeply as to the meaning of the great avalanches of material that inundate.
It is now the duty of leaders and senior decision makers in the competing, clashing, and still confronting groups to start the process of mending that could lead to reconciling, which could contribute to healing.
Even limited and partial healing would be better, more helpful than what we have right now. For what we have at present is a nation sharply and near irreversibly divided against itself, with brother against brother, and neighbour hostile and aggressive to neighbour.
We cannot go on like this, live like this. For that would be the height of stupidity, the depths of futility. No Statements of Polls – and no process as to their accuracy and integrity – are going to prove sufficient to eradicate what now boils in the blood. Instead, they would merely reinforce the debilitating depths of our nationwide degradations.
It is why we say, we recommend, we insist that, however matters turn out, leaders must talk, they must begin right now. How to mend and get the peoples of this country – all of them – to think and believe that they belong, they matter, they are important, and they have roles to play, much to give.
Our leaders must be genuinely ready to commit personal prestige, recalibrate individual hubris and ambitions, and invest their leadership capital within their respective groups to bring us back together in some shape and form. Again: anything would be better, more acceptable, definitely tolerable than what we have raging in the atmosphere and environment out there.
Our leaders must start now. They must go beyond the usual token words and the usual blandishments of appealing for working together, of representing all citizens, and demonstrate that they recognize the dangerous and unhealthy (most sickening) state of this country right now, and they must do something about it.
Something tangible, something positive, all the things so vitally necessary at this time. They – government and opposition, coalition and PPP – must prove to this nation that they are serious, that they are so engaged, that they are single-minded in carrying us all forward to the higher ground of a Guyana that is truly: One People, One Nation, One Destiny.
Can we bring ourselves to do so? We say yes! As to whether there is even a modicum of interest in being so is quite another story. And that is part of the continuum that is so much part of our ongoing tragedy.

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