What is Independence without harmony?

May 26, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

What do I say to my sisters and brothers on a day celebrating freedom? What is there to say that would not taint on the truths about us, not play on our disillusionments, not callous joke on our aspirations? This much I say without fear of principled contradiction.
Independence came 56 years ago, and we are not a day, an hour, out of the crib. Politically and racially, we are stuck in the treetops. Fifty-six years on, we are trapped by the unhealing past, this unyielding present, and I daresay the irreversible, unattainable, unwelcoming future. It is the reality of the richest nation on earth. Be it per capita, or according to some expert calculation and projection, or some sixth sense that it just is so. However our luscious richness is measured, something is missing. It is that the whole world is gained, but many have nothing to show for it. We have the world at our feet, but along the way, we lost our soul. We shed our individual and collective soul; you did, and I did too.
It was so before this oil. It is so more than ever before with the arrival of this femme fatale of an irresistible tempter-temptress. Thus, we are drained of the imperatives of neighbourliness; conscience, perhaps; I would contend even the required consciousness. At this time when we should be at our most rapt, we are content to be trapped by tricks, the courtship of moral failures, the stunts of those ethically stunted. I agree that we have had governments from below the gutter; I accept, too, that we have had both governments and leaders from the sewer. But it is the first time that Guyana has both gutter and sewer for government at the same time. Democracy may partially dress up, but reality unravels that costume stitch by stitch.
It is why I peer more than ever for an elusive nucleus of men and women with the requisite ethical arsenal, the moral stamina, a certain profoundness of judgment. I ease away, for it is vain searching for what is not there. The freedom to think, and the greater personal, internal liberty, to speak freely of what can only be constructive and progressive for this society, has not been ours to have and to hold. So, I will be bolder today on this Independence Day of 56 years vintage: we need harmony. The melody of it would eradicate our national sickness, but only if we hear it. The reality of national harmony could be our biggest patrimony. But only if desired…
It is timely that I remember the words of that sage Fra Giovanni Giocondo: “The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we only have to look. I beseech you to look.” I am looking, but I see only myself. Where is everybody else on this day of freedom? Who is there to clasp my reaching hand, brace my tottering steps? There has to be somebody. Any Guyanese…
We can go on, but not like this. To my fellow citizens, I leave this parting gift from American poet Walt Whitman: “The sum of all reverences I add up in you…I say they have all grown out of you… it is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.” We can make it happen. Together only. We must try.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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