Dear Editor,
As a concerned citizen I just wanted to share some thoughts I had after reading a press release from the Guyana Peace-Builders Network on the recent murders at Lusignan. I shared these thoughts with them and some individuals encouraged me privately, i.e. as one individual to another, to share these thoughts with you, the press and the public at large. Here goes:
I think something that needs to be addressed is the language that all are using….there’s this perception that there’s ‘us’ and then there’s…’them’. Maybe it’s because I’m too young, too naive, have a different mind-set or just plain too stupid but I still grapple to understand how the Lusignan murders (I think we should also be careful of the word ‘massacre’ because it usually carries a certain connotation) became such a point of racial tension so easily and so quickly. Perhaps the executive is to blame for this in large part because of emotional and reflexive statements that were made in the media before police could properly investigate. And by the way it appears that police did not secure the crime scenes either, allowing relatives, friends, neighbours and casual ‘lookers-on’ and the media (at least one camera crew) to visit the houses where the murders took place and maybe even view the bodies. This is not good police work and I’m sure it only served to fuel the anger, disgust and outrage of the Lusignan community.
I hope I’m mistaken at least in some part that the police seemed lax in this regard. But the executive can’t be blamed solely for this; criminal-minded people did this, not an entire political party or an entire community. The opposition on the whole hasn’t helped much. In taking up a defensive posture the opposition lost view of what was most important in this hour: the people. It seems sometimes as though our country’s politicians and pundits – at least the more vocal ones – have forgotten that this is about the people. Not some of the people, “my people”, those people, but all of the people…all of us Guyanese people, all of the people here with little or no other choice but to be here.
We need to make a habit of putting self-interest aside; we, all of us people, have a collective interest in seeing that our country does not continue down the route that it currently is lest we become citizens of a widening wasteland, rulers of nothing.
Yours faithfully,
Kojo McPherson
