H@RD TRUTHS BY GHK LALL – A society without shame, citizens without standards

Dec 16, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – Who are the likely real lowlifes so prevalent in Guyana? Who are the lowest of the low? So many clusters of individuals can be identified as operating below any ethical waterline, without any anchor of honor. They qualify. None escapes the besmirchments that they affix to themselves, which stick to them. Whither has a sense of shame, any sense such virtue, fled? So deformed they have become in their lack of self-respect, that I am tainted by the mere referencing of them. Women who are more about political wiles than natural wisdom. Men are so committed to deceiving that all they can do is dissemble. When challenged, the low unsheathes daggers.

GHK Lall

Who are the lowest of the low that saturate local existence? For one, it is usually not the small people. They are too busy trying to take care of their families, licking their wounds when they fall short. It is often. Those who are low on the local money ladder have nothing to be low about in their behavior. Their hands are too full to play low, dirty games, or be about what Guyanese call ‘common class.’ I can overlook a drunken bum delivering the piercing or insulting from his tumbled state of oblivion, or a helpless addict imprisoned by his demons. When the poor (the bulk of the population), and the lost and helpless are excluded, and the ladder is climbed, then the nests of low and lower litter every rung.

There are those who will do anything (anything) to kick down another citizen. Because a leader whispered. There are those who pretend blindness over the deceptions and deformities in those who pay them, corruption in governance, and crimes committed hourly against country, coffers, and citizens. What could be lower than such pretenders? Then there are the bullies: roads, media space, media appearance, the loudest and baddest, who provide schooling on what and who is lowest in the reckoning of decency, honesty, and integrity. There are the bullies who force feed a nation of the unbelieving and unwilling to accept falsehoods peddled as truths. This is the national version of square lies being pushed into round holes of truth that don’t cooperate. These bullies and blusterers are the lowest of the low: pathological deformities and delusions; character paralysis; strangers to cleanliness, and as dirty as can be imagined.

I could look the other way at women not caring that their slip is showing. But when they denude themselves in sordid silence, then horror comes from the ugliness of their nakedness. This is not all for one. It is all for nothing. The unclean. The vile. The repugnant. Or, in Guyanese lingo, what is stink and dutty. It fits perfectly. For Guyana has become a society without shame, and many Guyanese, as citizens without standards.

Many make powerful speeches about how much they are for transparency, integrity, decency, equity, and country, but cannot take any public stand, when all are openly and glaringly violated. When Guyanese cannot bring themselves to do so, then leading men are empowered, given renewed energies regarding their untouchable nature, their betrayals, and their pawn broking of the national inheritance. I hear that there are religious leaders in government, where are they? My God, we can’t be about God and nationhood and fatherhood and motherhood in houses of worship on Sundays, and hatred of brotherhood, sisterhood, and womanhood on Mondays.

These ones are the lowest of the low in the local environment with their countless hypocrisies, in their many unprincipled presences in this rudderless, depraved society, and the private ecstasies that come from being that way. Though accurate to the nth degree, I take another tack: this country is so hooked to life-support systems that I wonder if all the nurturing and medicines in the world are enough. But focusing on the healing at hand cannot be abandoned. It is why I spare not a second thought for brawlers, self-deceivers, brownnosers, and the suckers who have fallen in love with that role. What’s the point? Why acknowledge, give credibility to, their low, degenerate existence?

My position is basic: there is too much hatred and hurting in Guyana; that bandwagon is overloaded. The more cursing comes, the more I search for cures. For when cursing and countering rule, then the sewer overflows. We must distance from this pit of filth, for it is doing more than sickening us, it is killing us with national diseases. The tragedy of so many Guyanese beholden to one sick man. When we can’t think, can’t speak, can’t give free rein to conscience, then there is mutation to the lowest beast.

When the top loses pride in self-regard, those below cannot give up. If women cannot stand up for women, then the children are endangered. When civil society is wracked with self-interest, driven by fear, then the Ganges, Mecca, and the Holy Land cannot purify. What Guyana is cursed with is more reprehensible than oil curse and resource curse. Guyana is cursed when its sons and daughters stand for nothing. Nothing moral. Nothing ethical. Nothing honorable. When life is lived in that sickly, unnatural, state, the lowest is reached. I can speak and write. Go ahead, lynch me.

(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.)