Who is of the people and for the people?

Mar 23, 2020 Editorial

Attorneys rip them off when they come, through misleading them and leading them down darkened alleyways in which they are hopelessly lost. They come out from their legal ordeals mostly heavily impoverished, with little achieved. They would be the wretched supplicants who approach attorneys for representation before a system that is characterised by numerous injustices. Who is looking out for the people?

Similarly, medical men shred the people by promising the world falsely, while knowingly delivering the crippling, sickening, and death dealing. Tests and procedures are billed in continuing exploitations. There was no mending possible, but still the pious professionals in white coats found ways to separate the people from their meager savings. Who is of the people with genuine interest in their welfare?
It is the same sick story with the professional bureaucrats, the accountants (though tricking the tax system), and the auditors (through seeing what they want to see and not going to revealing places). In many ways, there are few-so few as not to mean anything of the consequential-who are dedicated to the people and for the people. These would be the poor Guyanese multitudes who have little in sound education and less in holdings. Thus, they are made to pay the endless array of prices levied. Most are manufactured, all unconscionable in the damage inflicted.
But for the worse in this society, there is the aristocracy of scoundrels, who say they stand for the people, by the people, and are of the same struggling, hoping, believing people. These would be the politicians. They are the bottom of the barrel. The evidence is abundant, telling its putrid story of how these coarse and corrupt con men and con women, from both sides of the Guyanese racial divide, set up the mass of the poorer classes on their side of the political fence to tear out the hearts of those who share space with them.
The people, the long-suffering poor in this society, have no tribunes, no defenders, no champions for their cause. There is no voice crying out in the wilderness, their hopelessness and the apprehensions of those who misplace their trust waste their confidences in men who betray them time after time. There is no voice, no presence that can be listened to, since such is drowned out by the high volume words of deceit that overwhelm truth and what is right for this country and its peoples.
So, they argue mindlessly about who cheated whom-and incite those in the middle to harbour such hatreds for and horrors about the other-that there is no room nor movement towards what this society needs. What this country and its bitter suspicious peoples direly need will neither be produced nor realised through the court process, nor by the threat of international sanctions, nor from any (for emphasis: any) final tabulation that emerges from the maelstrom that has been Elections 2020. The people on both sides have been whipped into too much of a frenzy to believe anything anymore, to care about anything anymore. That is, other than they won, and that the dreaded other side is vanquished.
Thus, a society languishes and falls apart, while it waits for one rescuer after another from foreign shores to rush over here and lift us out temporarily from the dismal place into which we have allowed our leaders to kick us into, as they use us, misuse us, and reuse us in election cycle after election cycle. The well-meaning neighbours and foreigners come, and they go. While the philosophies of the international community may be about what is idealistic, even fair and proper, all Guyanese must bear in mind that that community is also about what is in its vital strategic interests, first and foremost.
There are no gift horses. Whatever they bring or contribute, this issue still remains unchallengeable and unaddressed: what then when the next time arrives? What are we calling for, what are we settling for, and what are we buying? Maybe some time, definitely not any inclination towards anything resembling a solution that could be so labeled. So, we ask again, who in the political assembly and hierarchy is for the people, by the people, and of the people? All of them.