The essence of human dignity under fire

Jun 20, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,
“There are just those who have lost their basic rationalities and commonsense under certain ideologies/hatred/cultures. The limited resources in society/education almost decided that it is impossible to raise everybody into a decent person with commonsense. Tonight it’s my turn, and I’m glad it’s my turn and not the turn of anyone else’s, at least I could still take a few punches” (NextShark -June 17). Spoken like a PhD student and a brutalised victim and a minority one and a foreigner. The speaker was all four and studying in America, of all places on God’s green earth.
I read it all, and shivered from all of it. Because what this battered but dignified Chinese PhD student laid before the world was the essence of human dignity under fire, the imperatives of the human spirit that are indomitable, no matter the assaults, the character of combined onslaughts. Minority victimising is now sport for both obscene participants and intrigued passersby. It might be the physical troubles of the street; or the cyber arrows that flow so prodigiously across the length and breadth of those dens. It could be about what surfaced in Bartica, is ongoing with America’s January 6 look at itself, and last the upcoming COI of Guyana’s 2020 elections. As the wounded Chinese student noted, examinations of those and more would reveal “those who have lost their basic rationalities and commonsense under certain ideologies/hatred/cultures.” This young man speaks English better than most native ones, for even in his agony, he is not humiliated, but dignified of bearing, tempered in expression. He is most impressive. I wish that we had some, a score of scores of such like him here.
But I believe that we are now too far gone for such stirrings that soothe. For I think we already know too much about losing our minds to tribalism, to the senseless, to the hatreds that divided and set at war, for we have lived them also, and not just in 2020, but forever. This is the key: we like it. In our society this is what fuels us, sometimes as incited by instinctual fears, cult leadership ambitions, and our own inbred weaknesses. The America where I spent the prime years of my life, and which I thought I knew (but always feared) has itself descended into the chaos of racial and political madness. This is what comes out in the revelations and continuing exaggerations and distortions, the perpetual partisanships, in the Jan. 6 hearings in Congress. Undoubtedly, this is what will take centrestage right here, when we are bold enough-honest enough also-to peer into our souls. Rottenness lives there, the racial kind, the political type, the leadership variety, and most ordinary of strains. It is DNA, history, and future.
As an outsider, I can think along these lines of cool, clinical detachment. As a Guyanese of the soil, it is never any of those bloodless, unemotional elements. Such are the blows felt, like that brilliant Chinese gentleman, who showed us (he showed me) how to separate from and rise above the putrid fray. There is a certain fathomless, overpowering grace of “Tonight it’s my turn”, which if lived by more can make our own Guyana a better place. Today, I pray that should my turn ever come, then I would be like him, and rise above the hatreds, rages, frustrations, resentments. We have a COI coming up, and much more lurking in the wings, and under the thinness of our sickly skins. Perhaps then we will know more about ourselves and do something about it. But only if we so desire.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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