Because we lack sincerity, we live with perversity

May 02, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Media reports note that labour unions were calling for a unified worker front on worker’s day, as part of a week of observations. On any occasion that I come across words like ‘unified’ or ‘together’ or ‘one’ group, I stand still. I stop and watch to see where this is going to lead. It doesn’t matter to me who makes the call, only that it is sincere, really about a start towards an understanding of what is needed to move us from where we are stuck to where we have to go.
We may not want to go anywhere, but where we are fastened helplessly, self-destructively. The evidence is there for all to see and determine for themselves, what disunity and disharmony have brought us, and where both lead us today. Before it was politics and who has the stronger claim (numbers) to govern all Guyanese, and who has the greater right (history) to patrol the pews of power, and to rule over us. Today, both of those are still present, but now there is the added flame of oil, this most volatile and divisive of commodities. It is an inflammatory mix made in hell, one in which we love to stew, and fall more in love daily, due to the little occasional drips that trickle our way.
Talk about togetherness or oneness now, and it is the equivalent of neither will nor testament nor trust, only everyone staking a claim to oil’s bequests, its countless prospects. There are no brothers of the same source and same soil anymore, there are only the tantalising prospects, and who must get, and who must not. In this worst of family feuds and national disputes, the lawyers are not ones doing the dividing and making a killing. The politicians are. They make promises that they never intend to honour, which polarise us, impassion us, and prejudice us still further. There is no letup in the vigilance that regards contemporaries and neighbours as enemies. It might be Labour Day or Independence Day, Arrival or Emancipation, but there is a common cord, every day here is either All Fool’s Day or Boxing Day. In the former political leaders and their groups make total asses out of Guyanese with their hypocrisies, flatteries, or falsities about unity; in the latter, the longed-for unity degrades into either the oral tussles, written assaults, social media vilifications, or the actual low blows, headbutts, and elbows that have come to grace the national ring in which we somehow coexist.
There is nothing that I would call for more on Labour Day, or any other day, than a unified and solidified national front. But, given the political climate in which we live, and its ever-rising heat, such a call only triggers a countercall for one’s head. It is never less than astonishing that Guyanese watch, know, and understand fully how a few men and women misrepresent and mislead them, and still give them free rein to make a mockery of their hopes, dash their dreams, bury their aspirations. I am still more startled that the rank and file of the masses could survey the local coast for themselves, and effortlessly identify the few scores of Guyanese who reap the lavish, overflowing riches of this country, while the other 750,000 (or 780,000) have to be content with whatever handout or charity or other cheap trickery of ruling political leaders come their way.
It is how a nation is patronised and pauperised, but one that is still so conflicted by its bigotries and related passions that unity is the dirtiest of subjects in this corner of the world. The savvy oilmen know this, and they use or own dirty sticks to beat us into submission, so consumed we are, so addicted we are, to the disunities and disharmonies now deep-seated national ideology and culture. We call when it suits our whims – maybe, our fantasies also – for unity, when we ourselves are the biggest contributors to what are national tragedies from our own minds. Because we lack sincerity, we live with perversity. When we are empty of authenticity, then our lot is the iniquity of this destructive, disgraceful disunity. Thoughtful holiday to all!

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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