H@rd Truths by GHK Lall – Pushovers or patriots: what are Guyanese?

Oct 27, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – Guyanese have more oil than most of earth’s inhabitants, but many of those less gifted people pity them. Candidly, the weakness of Guyanese is a source of mocking. More oil than our ancestors dreamed about, and still more of the same hardships that they lived with, endured for generations.

I should know, for I am a son of that line or Guyanese who knew gritty and heavy circumstances. All of that can start changing today, this last Friday in October 2023. The oil now discovered and flowing into tankers and the pockets of foreigners has to have more of an impact, more meaning, positives for the rank and file in the Guyanese population.

To begin with, not every Guyanese is going to agree with anything written here today. It should not surprise anyone, for this is history providing yet another example of how citizens betray their own brothers and sisters. It is of how citizens join with foreign enslavers to put a yoke around the necks of their neighbors and fellows.

Those who live for the white enslaver’s favors are among the earliest sellers of themselves. Oh, they come from the top and cream of Guyanese society. They are the analysts who fix their minds and fix their interpretations and narratives to match smoothly with the white man’s story. They have no trouble betraying. They are the white-collar financial operators, the Cadillac political operators, who reduce themselves in kowtowing and crawling before the boot of greedy interlopers and ruthless predators, for the pittance of a nod of approval. Selling out is cheap in Guyana, and it has its cabals and its takers.

Those well-set Guyanese have nothing over which to protest. Well, so they fool themselves, and so they straitjacketthemselves. For the sellers and betrayers know that one slip of the tongue or pen, and it is the white man’s doghouse for them. Right now, those who betray their peers live in the master’s house; they areproud to be pushovers and participants in the plantation’s perversities. Against their own. No protesting for them. Not these grovelers and pushovers for a dollar, and the desire to please like well-trained dogs. No! they cannot break ranks and be in front of Office of the President. Not when they are in home offices, political offices, public service offices, and the mental toilets that function as their offices.

Only those who harbor patriotic instincts, the most genuine of such, should be out in front of the highest office in this country. They are the poor and thirsty, they are the weak and woe-ridden, they are the left behind made into losers by those at the top, and those who collect from them (and Exxon).Protest has always been the poor man’s last resort. Protesting is the first weapon made possible by impulses from deep in the gut of the people kept at the foot of the economic ladder. So much oil, yet so much neediness. So much money from it, but never enough to go around fairly, equitably.

Why in this society of so much glitter, they are those who litter the streets and pavements with their weakened bodies, their forgotten presences, now inconvenient reminders of how rich this country is? Why in this new Guyana of oil and the ravings of the world, there are those craving that fair share that assures them of three plates, with three squares, a day? Plates with something more on them for all, plates when the clock strikes those hours that signal that it is recharging and revitalizing time.

These are the people that protest since the powerful function of such action enlightened men and women. The foreign man and the white man with his conspiring local man say with authority (sometimes vehemence and virulence) that Guyanese have it good, never like this before. Egyptian pharaohs used to tell that to captive Israelites, according to Scripture. Today, the Israelis sing that same song to the corralled Palestinians, about how good things are in their refugee camps, and their pulverizing catastrophe (‘Nakba’). Yeah, protest and resistance against injustices take many forms, seek any expression that they can get.

Is this not what is happening in Guyana today with fully bald and partially bald and those with plenty of hair on head and face parroting the identical storylines of Rameses and Queen Victoria (Elizabeth II too), and President Howard Taft to the little colored children in these godawful climes? Kipling waxed brightly about the white man’s burden, but he rather neatly left out a piece. It is about the native ones the white man recruits to beat his own with pipe and pen, with pusillanimity and profanity. This is what makes the white man’s burden lighter, more rewarding. Divide and conquer, nah? At the crux, it is about what reeks of compromising, corrupting, and controlling. Those Guyanese will be anywhere but in front of the Office of the Big Cheese.

Those who have a conscience, feel the pain, know what it is to be used and discarded, they are the ones who must be standing before the Big People Office. This is bigger and greater than the provisions in a contract. It is about the kind of life that Guyanese must have. The kind of life that they are willing to struggle for, fight for, even die for, if this is where the path of protest leads.

(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.)