H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – From Ideology To Ideal

Jul 12, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The conception of an idea is by itself a miracle; one that separates man from beast.  The latter is about sating today’s pangs, the instincts honed by primordial self-preservation, conditioned reflex.  Man thinks, conceives of ideas that can lift past today, elevate high, determine the future.  Rather woundingly, grievously so, an idea is rare occurrence in Guyana, has been so for three scores and ten years, a lifetime.  When conception of an idea is so traumatizing, then the actual birth, full flowering, of one is a time of great anguish, greater internal turbulence, the greatest trials.  When I look at Guyanese brothers and sister across the landscape, I observe recoiling from any idea, and reaching for, settling comfortably in, an ideology.  It is a crippling, decimating, racial ideology.

I do not believe that we have grown by much in areas of substance in 70 years, and I am not near that milestone, yet.  Our zone of strength has been the warming sanctuary of race; it has mutated into our zone of clannish thinking, our zone of tribal retreat and restoration, when spirits are low.  We have been lucky in that we are still a polity in one piece, despite seasonal upheavals and the tempests that toss for a loss.  We fall backwards, and claim that as a victory.  In governing.  In leadership.  In relationships.  In economics and sociology and the civics of our always ruffled, but muffled, environment.  Today, when we have the biggest endowment that any nation, any people, could dream about, hope for, we still cannot wrest ourselves away from a most divisive and self-destructive ideology.  Though there is the fullest discernment and appreciation of where closing ranks can lead us, how it can benefit the citizens of this stricken nation, we are transfixed by racial ideology, paralyzed by the politics infused with raw prejudice.

I look at my brother, the President, and I beg him to tell me, share with this nation, a different truth.  Not the pro forma public relations truth about one, but of the one real idea about that is deep down in himself.  I lean in the direction of my other brother, the Vice President, and I urge him insistently: give up the forked, let an idea come that is what is straight and true for the peoples of this nation.  It cannot be about what is self-serving.  I whisper to my brother, the Opposition Leader, and plead, let us think, let us rise, let us travel from where we are, to where we must be.  It is my message to all three of these brothers of mine.

The idea that Guyanese would one day be considered the richest on earth, and accurately so, (or could be), would never have crossed my mind.  Rich, yes; but the richest of them all, not at all.  But we are the richest, and in this season of what ought to be the greatest delight, I feel like the sickest, weakest, poorest man on earth.  Now, that is not the pain of an idea enduring a most difficult passage of discovery, it is reality.  I am sick because of how race, in very subtle detail, supersedes all else.  I am made weak by how bigotry, as closeted as it is, reigns supreme and from high to low, and largely across also.  I feel poor because of what we can be, but refuse to be.  We have been given the keys to the kingdom on earth, but the best that we are able to do is to lock ourselves in prisons that fasten us to the past, that inhibits us from moving with energy and alacrity and freedom to experience what it is like to be rich, then richer, and last the richest of all.  Perhaps, as the thought comes, because we started out at the top from day one (the richest), the only pathway left for Guyanese was to go down, and then plummet to the bottom.

The Greeks were reputed to be the wisest of all, but check how they fell apart through infighting.  The Romans had the power and the tools to rule the world forever, and then they caved in from within, due to their failure at societal cohesion, and clearheaded, clinical coherence. Villains from the inside weakened scandalously, while vandals from the outside came and callously wrenched their gobs of flesh, their pints of blood.  I urge my fellow Guyanese to pause.  Is this not what is happening here, with Mr. Blinken coming and going, and all this winking and nodding going on with Guyanese caught in a spell, left lesser for it.  So much given, so little that is right done by it.  Where is the will to fight for our rights?  Yes, understanding comes that our greater joy is in fighting each other.

So, we return to where we are stuck helplessly: race.  The dominant idea that it is, its conquering culture, its enduring passion and electricity.  We foolishly think that we profit from race practices.  Others laugh at Guyana’s follies; they are the ones really, handsomely profiting.  Their ideas are in the right places.  Where are ours?  Do we have any?

(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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• conditioned, GHK Lall, past, reflex, thinks

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