The harrowing Guyanese social environment

Jul 20, 2022 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Someone forwarded a 30-second video to me Monday evening.  It was brutal, ugly, troubling, and much more.  In those 30 seconds, I discerned rage, hatreds, and poisons festering unaddressed in this society.  I think it is not unknown, only ignored to our national peril.

The video was of a white station wagon type vehicle and a motorcycle behind it.  It was of a roadway, which I took to be on the eastern edge of central Georgetown because of the silhouette of the premises of one of the larger waste removal companies in the background.  Around the vehicle and motorbike were a number of Guyanese, mainly youths.  I saw a young man being attacked and kicked in strikes capable of decapacitating.  He was knocked cold, and crumpled in motionless heap on the road.  A young lady I presume to be with him and standing beside the vehicle is next attacked and beaten mercilessly, all the while cowering from the rain of blows.  Both knocked out male and pounded female appeared to be members of one of Guyana’s larger demographic subsets.  Their attackers of another of the two major segments.  A man in the uniform of a security guard armed with what Guyanese call a ‘long gun’ tried vainly to intervene to prevent the mayhem, but was warned off.  He retreated helplessly, with his long gun now pointed in the air, a spectator to the brutalities.  He was of the same demographic as the attackers.  This is the sum of the 30-second nightmare of Guyana.

Editor, this is the hidden story of Guyana.  We got sharp, pungent tastes of it at Mon Repos, what I think is Mandela Avenue on Monday, and a while before Cotton Tree.  This is the essence of our harrowing social environment, our tortured and tragic reality, that is right below the surface sheen.  Nobody wants to talk about it.  They talk about the Police, the other side, democracy, and the rule of law.  I say that what I present today is the rule of the street, the rule now gaining yardage by day, by incident, by readiness.  On Monday alone, I was listener to two encounters that reflected the edginess on our congested streets, the rawness of our tense roads.  I get the sense that sentiments are so scorching that anything could, and does, flare into the frightening.

I submit that it is not a matter of road rage, or of routine passions and prejudices.  It is of what boils beneath our breasts, as to who betrayed (no confidence), who cheated (elections), who robs and devastates today (leaders), and at whose expense.  Right or wrong, it is the state of mind.  To understate, we are in a bad place, a thoroughly disastrous state-in-the-waiting.  I flinch and shudder and cringe, at the meaning of all this, where these isolated incidents could lead.  It is my belief that it is to the inevitable outlet that history has repeatedly confirmed is thought to be the answer and pursued aggressively.  It is my belief that we sit on that box, and that the right kind of leadership and exhortation could remove the lid in a blink.  We get the previews daily in town and country, with strangers and for no reason at all.

When there is thought to be a lack of effective leadership, then the outliers and pockets assume importance, gather substance.  In other circumstances, I may have used words like radical and militant in place of effective for leadership.  The point is that however implemented on the ground, the vacuum is filled by splinters, and since there is impatience with leadership, then the mob controls.  What I saw in that video was a mob on the move, and unconscious or collected expression of suppressed frustrations.  It is of who has, and who doesn’t, and also who is seen to benefit from our bounties, and who is left to beg to exist, and reduced to collectors of alms.  Mobs don’t have minds, as we (I) saw in that video, but they understand (or are made to understand) ostracising, marginalising, demonising, and wanting.

When people are left to want in a time of all these overwhelming riches, then they want to get even, so they hit out at who happens to be convenient, who is made into whipping boy and whipping girl.  There is an answer to this.  It is that all, including the unthinking, unknowing, and unfeeling, must appreciate having a place at the national table.  Not as recipients of occasional charities, but as participants in their destiny.  I know that inclusion is a dirty word, and coming from me it is a tricky, backdoor way (as accused) of bringing losers into the winner’s circle.  I think that we make the worst mistake in our already mistake-prone existence when we harbour such self-destructive outlooks.  It is time to go, but I leave in my space what took place on Monday, takes places daily, and is bursting at the seams and rearing for expression.  Of any kind.

Sincerely,

GHK Lall

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