Recent letters to this newspaper, online comments and the word on the street all point to a general feeling of revulsion at the escalation of terror and horror visited upon our country over the past few months. There is no shortage of ideas as to what ails Guyana or what needs to be done.
Suffice it to say that we have come to a very sorry pass indeed in our history as a young republic.
Whether we are a nation living on the edge of the abyss (the optimists’ view) or whether we have already gone head over backside into the depths of an irreversible, all-encompassing decline (the pessimists, some might say, realists’ view) is a moot point. The mass murders at Lusignan and Bartica and the beheading of Farouk Kalamadeen are irrefutable proof that, as one reader has suggested, a cancer, the symptoms of which have been clear for years now, has taken over our society.
As a people, we are now almost perpetually on edge. A stranger’s passing glance on a minibus or in a market, an unfamiliar face or car in the neighbourhood, a loud noise breaking the stillness of the night, all or any of the above would be enough to arouse deep and irrational fear that we might be the next target of bloodthirsty and mindless killers, for no reason whatsoever than that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Call it paranoia if you like, but that is what we have come to under the new rule of faceless barbarians.
With every passing day, the structures and mores of civilized behaviour are being swept away by the forces of a ruthless barbarism. Meanwhile, the police force plods on and the politicians pontificate.
The police, everyone knows, are ill-equipped for the task at hand. The Government would have us believe that it knows what is really going on, who is behind the bloody anarchy and why. But this only makes their impotence to arrest the situation all the more frustrating and tragic.
The Opposition lacks unity and discipline. And civil society appears to be depleted and exhausted.
Where then are the leadership and credible reassurance that our divided and traumatized nation so desperately needs? Where is our moral compass? And where is our social conscience?
Our letters column is awash with theories about our past, present and future. We are not unique among media houses in this respect. Indeed, the collective outpourings in the various media from home and our diaspora might be said to be the closest thing we have to a national memory, a national psyche, a national consciousness, as it were. They reflect what some have chosen to refer to as our “virtual nation.”
This newspaper was, not so long ago, accused of allowing the atrocities at Lusignan and Bartica to fade from the news. As we explained, we have no intention of letting this happen. But the letter writer was quite right to jolt the perception of forgetfulness and fatal complacency.
Sadly, Lusignan, Bartica and the Kalamadeen murder are not isolated incidents and appear to be part of a diabolical pattern in which each subsequent act of brutality confirms the widespread belief that things have fallen apart.
So, how do we as a nation, virtual and real, try to bring it all together again, even as the authorities strive to re-establish a modicum of law and order? Some have called for a national truth and reconciliation commission to revisit the abuses of the past, to establish an objective truth, to begin the healing and to start the process of nation-building anew.
But are we all prepared to subsume our egos and give such a commission the overriding moral and legal authority to establish the historical truth and to heal the nation’s deep and festering wounds? Are we prepared to put aside suspicion, prejudice and hatred in the interests of peace, harmony and the collective good? And do we wait for the politicians to continue to bicker before they finally act, when it may already be too late?
Maybe this debate needs to be opened up to allow all to have their say and maybe we need to move beyond the virtual debate in letters columns, in online comments in blogs and on Guyana websites.
All of us in what is loosely known as civil society – academics, the legal profession, business people, the media, religious organizations, the youth – all the people of this land need to press the powers that be to establish a forum, perhaps with external assistance, to allow all Guyanese to have their say. For it is the people of this country who must ultimately decide whether we have a future together in pursuit of the ideals of our national motto – One People, One Nation, One Destiny.
To fail to act now would be to allow the forces of barbarism to triumph over civilization. It would be akin to an admission that the cancer in our national system is terminal, rather than coming together to find the strength to excise the cancer and begin the long road back to national wellness.
