Rights and responsibilities, imbalance and virulence

Sep 28, 2024 News

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall…

Kaieteur News – The only standard placed on me with these writings is that I keep them simple.  To that I add humility and honesty.  And to those, there must be the responsibility to courtesy, regard for the rights of others.  Without venturing into any profound references to the wisdom of the great philosophers and thinkers, inspiring records from antiquity or more recently, I revisit yet again, the rights of one Guyanese versus those of another, all others.  Where does what is due the former stops, those of others start?  When do my rights supersede those of fellow citizens?  What happens, what to do, when they collide, often jarringly?

The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), a name not held high by some in this polity, recently spoke of paid ads and platforms being used to scorch and pierce.  As much as the prime objectives are to denounce and suppress, there are rights due to those responsible, whether public authors or private backers.  Their freedoms are no less sacred that mine, or any other Guyanese.  The key is what either they or I do with the cherished freedoms given to us or embraced by us.  If it is to disembowel those found disagreeable, or castrate the unyielding, or force-feed a self-serving state of mind on those held as enemies, then cherished freedoms have just been profaned.  The expansive reduced to the narrow, the absolute minimum.

As Guyanese, there are enough attackers and despoilers arrayed against us.  The ones here to wrest the national inheritance in exchange for pittances, protections.  How is it that many of the bright men and women of Guyana look the other way?  Why do they generate the rage to scalp their fellow citizens, when the real stealth operators are those who once enslaved our forebears under one banner (spiritual instrument) and now subjugate us with a new one (legitimized weapon)?  This is how patrimony is dissipated.  This is how national wealth is coveted by a declared enemy, a neighbor of all people.  Nemeses inside the gates and across the river.  They crave what Guyana has, and the best that we are capable of, committed to, consumed by, is to maim each other endlessly.

Seeing the other group’s maladministration should not be used as a screen to be silent on the equivalent from our own.  What progress is possible then?  How could any individual, any clan, any country get anywhere when one right exercised dilutes another right.  The one to be honest with ourselves, responsible before contemporaries.  Tables and narratives proliferate; I suggest that the first graphs and charts be about our own passage and trajectory.  What does that arc reveal?  Spend money, spill ink by the barrel, to bare the malfeasances of competitors, but not as cleverness to distract from an obscure the same (or worse) by our own.  I can live with mistakes.  There is immeasurable contempt for those who willfully cheat, then deliberately falsify, and last seek to intimidate into oppressive silence.  There is difficulty in deciphering how wrongdoing of the past justifies the wrongdoings of the present.  If there is a difference of distinctive strain, as claimed, then the corruptions of the past cannot be repeated, or employed as a rationale.  If then, why is so wrong now?  If now, then what about that from before?  I hope that fellows can appreciate that this is neither a platform nor the ideal for nation building, for the construction of a radically different national character.  I now switch to those leading.  They must be the pacesetters, the standard bearers of a new Guyana.  Not as they say, or claim to be about, but as they live.

When a leader revels on each occasion that he speaks in the intensity of a barroom brawler, his followers rush to do their best imitation of their role model.  Respect and courtesy disappear, mayhem takes hold.  Rights are routinely violated.  When another leader is the most sinister expression of virulence for sometimes hours every Thursday, a foaming-at-the-mouth conjurer and fabricator unequalled in this society, then those beholden to him have just received their marching orders.  Instead of when, I should say in what form, but then there is the record that speaks.  So, there were those developments over which the GHRA was so pained, rightly so.  It has absorbed its share of blows for its efforts.  When another leader frowns and fiddles, Rome is restlessly heaving, slowly burning.  What hope, what prospects, for the luckiest (most graced is my preference) people in the world?  The men commanding the rigs have rigged us well.  Guyanese explode at Guyanese, are overjoyed to do so.  And for what and whose benefit?  They called me a subversive when I said that we must think like how those, whose highest priority is to separate us from our endowments, and then seize them.  When we get into the heads of exploiters and potential invaders, then we will never be readier, never stronger.  But that neutralizes the incomparable malice that consumes and controls and leads to nothing, but condemnation preceded by vilification.  Men from the north, and those from the west, have daggers pressed against Guyanese necks, yet there are the psychic delights from our own in the battleaxes that they use to bludgeon those exercising their right to write, right to speak, right to think.

Last, some routine constitutional reforms will come, but minimal only.  One of the rights sure to be enshrined is to savage each other at will.  Freedom is a poisoned chalice.  I have only rights, there is no responsibility.  And that, fellow citizens, is the beginning and continuing Guyana story. One where there is rejoicing in making enemies of each other, trampling upon others’ rights.

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