2020 Elections: Scintilla of memoir

Jul 27, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When you are involved in journalism and social activism, there are dimensions to the human mind that you encounter that are positively amazing and negatively bewildering. People will tell you things that are incredibly stupid and you wonder how any mind can become so warped.
If I were to write about my media career, readers would not believe the kind of stupidities living, walking humans are capable of. Just two examples.
Do you know how many people told me about the evidence they had of Charrandass Persaud’s plan to vote for the no confidence motion (NCM) and the persons that arranged the bribe for him? I was in the kitchen with my wife when a nationally well-known pro-PNC activist called me from New York. He said he had all the details of all the players involved weeks before the NCM.
Secondly, a talk show host on channel 9 devoted his entire programme assigning dead seriousness to a satirical column I did poking fun at the stupid mentality of the collective leadership of APNU+AFC.
I jokingly referred to artificial skin masks the Russians made for 35,000 dead people and created the images of the artificial faces using huge television screens that were left on the Linden highway for people to collect freely.
These are just two of thousands of crazy communications from weird souls in my 32 years of media activities and more than 50 years of social activism. But there is a simultaneous current that flows in the opposite direction.
From the time the PPP government abandoned the politics of Jaganite essentialism, and I became a critic of such betrayal by Jagdeo and Ramotar, I have had a rich exposure that has been a profound learning experience. East Indians from every class stratum – rich, poor, educated, semi-educated, unemployed, middle class – would engage me in conversations that had touches of sad irony.
They would express genuine understanding for my emotional revulsion of the immoral directions the PPP had gone into. Without exception, they would applaud my courage, agree with my sentiments, wished the PPP was not doing what it was, but there was the inevitable caveat.
You had to be inside the moment of revelation to understand the East Indian mind as that mind rambled over how they conceive of the PNC. The caveat came from all of the class strata I named above. But it was a moving experience to hear the labourer, fish vendor, carpenter echo the same warning.
I will summarize their reaction in a quote that, though is not the exact words, captured the depth of their feeling. It went like this; “but Freddy, you know what you are doing, you know if the PPP loses, them PNC people coming back and will never come out.”
I swear on my parents’ grave that refrain was always present when Indians approached me to talk about what I said on television or wrote in my columns about the PPP government or what I did in the picket line that they saw in the newspapers.
Above I offered two examples of the negative vibes I got. Here are two examples of that caveat. On the first day of the Jagdeo libel writ against me, the PPP packed the courtroom with dozens of supporters. I will never forget the image of that lady who spoke to me on the road afterwards. She wore a black shirt with a baby pink, transparent blouse. She told me she reads what I write, likes me but she didn’t want the PNC to come back and people like me and Kaieteur News will bring back the PNC and then you can’t move them.
The second example was when the PPP government terminated my contract at UG. The next day, I got a phone call from an Indian lecturer who offered sympathy and expressed deep regrets because he said I was a good lecturer but he ended the conversation with the happiness that the PPP had won the 2011 election the month before my termination so the PNC cannot control UG as it used to do.
The warning or the trepidation never penetrated my mind. I was driven to speak out against the PPP’s autocracy, and I felt that the bad old days of the PNC were long gone. Now look at 2020. What is one of the lessons to be learnt?
We middle class educated, urban Georgetowners continue to fail to see that the ordinary man and woman know their politics. These ordinary souls were fearful that people like me and Kaieteur News would bring back the PNC and knowing the PNC, it will never come out of power. Look how right they were.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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2020 Elections: Scintilla of memoir

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