I have never seen a more ironic year than 2022

Jan 01, 2023 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – My birthday was last Friday and I devoted my column to that milestone in my life. People have choices that must be respected. One of the things I have asked my daughter, my only child, to do in this life is to inculcate respect for the choices people make once those priorities are personal.

I grew up hearing people ridicule older men for marrying women that are 30 years their junior. I discussed such things with my daughter telling her if that marriage makes that gentleman feel happy then it is none of our business to frown on what does not affect us.

I am 72 years of age. If people do not like to disclose their age, that is a personal matter that does not concern other humans. I know prominent citizens over 70 that dye their grey hair. That pathway is their personal space. It is none of our business to discuss it because a man dyeing his hair has nothing to do with our lives and development in the country.

So yes, I have no problem with revealing my age. And in those 72 years that I have lived, I have never seen a year that has been more ironic than 2022. I had a little chat on Friday with Minister, Sonia Parag in which I asked her to appear on The Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show in the coming days.

I intoned that it is urgent that she does so because what we are seeing in Guyana since March 2020 is simply bizarre and inexplicable. I told the minister not in my lifetime have I seen such disappointment in people that I thought I knew. She responded by saying she is enduring the same experience.

What is taking place in this country has no basis in rational thinking and in 2022, we saw an ocean of it. As the year was about to end, look what one of the leading media houses did. It is cause for national concern. It is a dangerous trend that threatens democracy. I am warning this nation that this act by the Stabroek News (SN) needs its condemnatory attention.

Please see my column yesterday on the issue. The newspaper took out my name out of a missive it published. Not a discussion on me. Not someone in high praise of me, but just my name, my name and nothing else; my name that was mentioned by a letter-writer.

Here is evidence of the moral destruction that is emerging in Guyana. A few weeks before the SN did this on Friday last, it received an award from the EU mission in Guyana for professional journalism. You would have thought that such recognition would drive SN to be more ethical and professional.

Why is 2022 so ironic a year? We are witnessing a trend of positive and negative neutrons going not in opposite direction but crazy direction that makes the dialectic so interesting. Here is my contention and the reason for describing 2022 as the most ironic in my lifetime.

The government is being criticized constantly for not being democratic. But the critics of the government are heading for undemocratic pathways while the government itself is going in democratic overdrive. Isn’t this confusing dialectics?

Here is a hypothetical example. The critics of the police accuse the police of stealing. The police say alright, we are ashamed and will stop our unethical practice. But the very people condemning the police are committing grave criminalities. This is what I mean by the year of ironies.

Civil society is contending that the government is undemocratic. So the president leaves his office and goes around the land trying to assess people’s need. In other words, he is heading in a democratic direction. But where is civil society heading? Check their deportment. There is nothing in it that tells you they want to know or care to know what democracy is.

The media fits neatly in this category. After what the SN did to me, can’t you see the divergent pathways of the media and the president? A competent trained mind like financial analyst, Joel Bhagwandin keeps telling me that he cannot get his analysis on the oil economy published in the mainstream media while Hamilton Green is given space almost three times a week.

Finally, the two Opposition parties PNC and AFC. What about these two parties that tells you that in 2022 there were bastions of democratic thinking? On the contrary, government and Opposition went in opposite direction last year. My opinion is that while the government followed the democratic signpost in 2022, the two Opposition parties kicked it down.

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

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