Dear Editor,
You gotta give it to the PPP. They may be spectacular failures in many things but they are A students in understanding the psyche and mentality of the Guyanese people and knowing how to control and exploit it. They know they can engage in plain ole bribery of the Guyanese public using their own hard-earned money and get away with it because of ignorance (educational and political), indifference, knowledge malaise (refusal to learn) and because of the effects of ethnic programming. It is the battered people syndrome.
We are talking about dirt poor people trapped in a cocoon of impoverishment, hardship and struggle. The vulnerabilities of their psyche are known to the political masterminds. These people are inclined to get excited and to define success by new, big shiny things.
They are aware of the rampant corruption and economic rape that accompanies such shiny things but they are disinclined to change their condition. Many cannot think consequentially beyond the ne,w shiny thing itself.
That a brand new road was built with their taxes and that the corruption involved in the building of the road is taking money from their pockets and putting it into the pockets of those who benefit from such corruption is usually forgotten.
Many Guyanese cannot see the acts of corruption for what they really are: a choke and robber contractor holding them with a knife to their throats and taking the money from their pockets.
It is no different from your house being invaded in the middle of the night and your hard-earned money being taken.
In a place where people constantly live without, anything new, shiny, different and big is like manna from heaven. So the PPP will be taking taxpayers’ money and using it to build shiny objects. And the majority of Guyanese people will not do a single thing about it. Some will complain but most will bite the bullet, take their licks, watch inequality rise to destroy their quality of life and either stay silent or complain to themselves. But come election day, they will not change and will venture into the polling booth and vote their tragic affliction.
They cannot change. The greatest travesty of this nation is that it cannot change because its people are not yet educated to a sufficient level to contemplate and execute change.
Ignorance is still king in Guyana on a profound scale.
As long as ignorance remains emperor, the nation will be wearing the Emperor’s new clothes.
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell
