Dear Editor,
There is a profound weariness that envelops and overloads Guyanese from all walks and persuasions. It is a weariness that devastates and enfeebles; apathy and malaise, as descriptions, suffice only to grasp at the edges of this bone-crushing, muscle-melting, mind-numbing national condition.
Sure there is fear and anger. But the anger, while thick and heavy, has coagulated into the distinctive sluggishness of feeling, thinking, and movement, which characterizes a dreadful disease, usually a slowly terminal one. The anger flares, and then fades quickly into nothingness. Yesterday was Baishanlin, the day before Amalia Falls; today it is the supposed failure of GECOM and the extent of parliamentary power, or with whom such resides. Does anything work anymore? Or they only do when the masters say that they do? The anger sizzles, then fizzles…
Yesterday was graced with the disbelief and laughter over a minister humiliating herself publicly; today it is the gaudy spectacle (allegedly) of the chief legal officer of the land engaged in a grotesque exhibition of the utterly bizarre, but undeniably unacceptable, if not wicked. Except, of course, to those for whom standards and values are things of the past, perhaps never existed.
Just as obscene and abominable and classless do not capture the unprecedented excesses of the PPP government and its leading people so, too, do indifference and disgust and rage fail to encompass the sentiments of the Guyanese people at every new tawdry development.
What will tomorrow bring, if not more of the same? Should citizens now expect continuing optical and battery at the hands of political luminaries ready to revel in scintillating wattage through exposure of physical and mental nakedness? Or the attendant unparalleled ugliness of protective postures and manoeuvers aimed at retaining incestuous secrets within the political family, even though the nation is subjected to undeterred serial molestation?
For those with the stomach to take a careful look, just look: It has been one brazen lie, one massive fraud, one heinous felony, one degrading lunacy, one specious defence after another. Like clockwork, one after another. And these are only those that have been dragged forward to bask in the glare of day.
Every time it is believed that things and people cannot be worse, new depths of debauchery and degradation are plumbed, as if to confirm the most tremulous of fears. Only weariness is left: a sweeping desultoriness of the spirit. It is an endless weariness at the bottomless madness and ugliness that inhabits and stalks this society, and destroys it beyond recognition day after sordid day. And for all of this citizens know who to thank.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
