We built a national edifice on trickeries but now expect purity?

Apr 12, 2020 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Guyanese must be among the most peculiar people found anywhere. We are unique in our chronic self-deceptions. I offer a short smattering of how we are daily, and which have all come back to torment us when needed the most.
We cheat on everything, which includes the so-called best amongst us; yet it is as if nothing has happened. The cheaters and falsifiers pretend at newfound purity. One man, a once senior man in this country, long alleged to be a serial felon and still an unreconstructed bigot lectures to the public about integrity and nationality; another who could not make a simple decision for fear of going against political benefactors, now steps forward to share his recommendations to leaders about leadership.
Are we glaring hypocrites, or what!
Mention one leader and even his own people bow before the barrages of blunt truths; but they grin and continue with unruffled indifference, for as he goes, so do they.
The list is long: thief, corrupter, inciter, intimidator, abuser, executioner, and that particular leader is not the only one in the record of Guyana’s leadership class. It is men such as these, who are embraced worshipfully as national saviours. And it is as if none of those means anything. Leaders set the values and standards prioritized; a nation of followers embraced in rich imitation.
Daily, we take what is not our own (graft). Or hold back what belongs to the state (taxes) and thus rob treasury and people. Or succeed in thwarting justice.
As a high-profile example, I refer to that sub-judice matter going back and forth with arguments about sufficiency, when it is about integrity and duty, amidst the parsing for the cover of legality.
Piloting that decayed ship are the same people who wax hypocritically about constitution and its sacred provisions; they do so while standing as epitomes of what is profane. Money talks.
It has the handsomest of countenances. These high-priced operators are highly obvious in the patented trickeries employed to succeed. And because this is Guyana, they do. If they play cards right, the legislature or high council beckon to serve themselves or to corrupt all who come close.
This is what is throughout this land, with too few principled people left to take anywhere upward. With such people jockeying for stewardship over the affairs of this society, there can be only thicker darkness, one with a velvet sheen.
The slick educated governors set the stage for the poor less crafty to follow in their footsteps. We are fast learners mastering difficult curves with practice and increasing speeds. I call them-leaders and supporting citizens-for what they are: self-servers, self-enrichers, and self-aggrandizers of the sleaziest stripes possible.
I find all laughable, contemptible. They don’t fool me, despite their strenuous efforts at pretended clanliness and rare principle. These are the people who look to lead this land.

Neighbours know neighbours for who and what they really are, ditto colleagues and comrades, friends and family also: dealers and confidence tricksters.
That is part of the gaudy and bizarre national circus where democracy is the shielding banner. Where does it stop? The ongoing disaster of Guyana is that it does not stop, not even for the ordinary. For there was something as basic and necessary as parking, and it became a war for widows and orphans, the downtrodden and those taken advantage of, when at the core, it was only about the nasty, dirty, ugly, politics.
When the kimono was parted, there was the mystery revealed: politics at play. There is a crisis of a virus, but a bigger political one obsesses.
The sagas are endless. Lies and subterfuges are all an integral aspect of the individual and societal character, bar only a handful. And on this, we want to build a national house of honesty. With these searing degrees of the disingenuous in free rushing flow, we paddle for any nonexistent port. And with all of this as context, history, character, and visions of what ought to be, we come to the gateway to paradise.
I see a people bewitched by the biggest prize of all, when all the marbles are being played for and the house is on the line. Now they hope, they clamor, that authenticity would reign, and not duplicity; that there will be the politically clean instead of the electorally contaminated, and this is with all that is stake.
Is somebody kidding me! How we fool ourselves! This is where we are: a lying, deceiving, tricking people, at all levels, and by some miracle, there is the expectation that accuracy, transparency, and integrity will prevail and win the day.
Though the day itself is polluted beyond remedy, the self-deceptions continue.
In perhaps the most telling irony of all, our rampant self-deceptions have traveled the circle and now haunt, when we need the straight and credible the most. From where credibility will come, I ask. By whose hands, some tendril of straightness, I challenge.
Thus, reciprocal charges are leveled. For decades, we have constructed a national edifice that stands as a global monument to great untruths, greater iniquities, and among the greatest of craven and mentally corrupted citizens anywhere. And now we desire to see god. So that is what we get: false gods to magnify our miseries. Look at us: a society built on slipperiness and sleaze, and we expect truth and righteousness.
Like I said, a strange and curious people we are.

GHK Lall

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