A day of national honour

Jul 31, 2023 News

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Hard truths….

Kaieteur News – Throughout their existence, Guyanese have been brutalized and victimized by tough guys and hardcases that they allow to walk all over them.  For the most part, local political scoundrels, who operate under the fancy flag of leaders and ministers, have reeled in, chewed up, and spat out citizens like yesterday’s garbage, like some soiled relationship better severed.  That is, until there is the next need to use them, by wrapping them around the thumb, and then getting them to bow to the low and high cons that pass for governance and principle from principals in this country.

Guyanese: today is the day of test, the first strains of what the peoples of this nation stand for.  Resilience is called for; there will be resistance later.  Who knows, there could soon come to that time and opportunity that rejection is what follows next.  Guyanese honor themselves with a rare display of standing for what is due to them.  Or they give others permission to look upon them as people most dishonorable, where their patrimony is concerned.  They must fight for what is their own; we must.  I must.  From my perspective, there are simply too many Guyanese sisters and brothers who are grappling with hard times in these the best of times.  Clearly, the situation calls for rousting of self to oust those who will neither listen nor adjust nor treat with the fullness of respect that is due.  I speak of locals, and I speak of the aliens who come here and set up an aggressive presence, one dripping of smartly concealed denigrations, palpable discriminations.

Foreign corporate students of Guyana’s way of life, and its culture of degradation into docility, now come with their chains and whips, their steel-toed boots and their gleaming Colgate smiles.  We are for the Guyanese people, they say; we are as one with them, as the best of partners that can be had anywhere in sun or snow.  We are as one with their leaders, their visions and versions of what is democratic government.  But the only ones benefiting, and incomparably handsomely, are the ones from the outside of Guyana.  Guyanese, ask this of self: who are the ones announcing record-shattering profits?  It is not the Guyanese people, and anyone who says differently is a pathological liar, a deceiver of the lowest, meanest order.

Then, try this one: who are the ones always with a knot in their stomachs, a hole in their pockets, and a huge, wide gap in their expectations?  It is not the growing contingent of finely clothed, and richly fed foreign swashbucklers, the privateers that embassies and envoys nod in approval at their corporate hauls.  It is Guyanese by the tens of thousands, more accurately by the hundreds of thousands, who don’t have.  Forget about profits, all they yearn for are the basic substances that aid in a dignified living.  This is while all the score sheets, statistical charts, and tables gleam with text and numbers about how each Guyanese with a head that can be counted is so rich, so much the envy of the world.

My concern, my issue, and those are bland, bloodless words that do not begin to give an idea of the grim, dismal existence that dishonors the richest people in the world with the fastest growing economy and, of more recent vintage, people now reclassified into that holy of holies realm, which is they are “high income.”  My problem, my bodily ache, is that there is this reality of Guyanese in oil Guyana.  Hungry Guyanese at the bottom, worrying about bills and making the mortgage.  Goosestepping Guyanese leaders, marching smartly to the dictates of foreign saboteurs of the national promise.  Kowtowing Guyanese, at the behest of political leaders, slobbering and surrendering to the commands of any foreign Ally, Anthony, or Anne, and their practiced gospels that make sausages of citizens massed at the bottom of this poor country.  In a recent article on sexual exploitation in the mining area of Mahdia, the Wall Street Journal still found it appropriate to pin the label of “impoverished” on Guyana.  We are the richest, but still among the poorest, in this baffling irony of ironies.

Guyanese, where is the spine?  What happened to the blood of warriors that flowed to and from the chambers of the heart?  Or, is it, as said, only the sick and the weak were left when the boats finally touched down here?  This is the time to test our honor, to expose how much rage is pent-up within us, and to manifest whether we will be sitters on our haunches for the rest of our lives, or we will rise from squatting on our ankles.

The brave have succeeded more often than not, when fortune is pursued.  And there is a tide in the affairs of men that favors when taken at the flood.  I think that this is the Guyanese tide that could lift all boats, large and low, local and foreign.  It all depends on the value that Guyanese place on their honor.  It must not be sullied anymore.  It must soar into the faces of exploiters and oppressors.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of Kaieteur News.

 

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• esilience is called for, Goosestepping Guyanese leaders, Guyanese, the mining area of Mahdia

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