Dear Editor,
In the hushed silvery stillness of the predawn hours, I find myself ruminating on the way things were and are over the last fifty years. A lot of the time my thoughts trace the contours of comparing and contrasting, while probing into the large familiar areas; the rest of the time I venture further afield.
For starters, financial improprieties and depredations coursed through both twenty-four years and twenty-three years. But for sheer vastness of scale and volume of dollars involved, the era of twenty-three years is the winner by countless laps. There is no comparison.
Then, the so-called dark days of the first three decades were characterized by food lines and shortages and flight. Yet, in the uninterrupted music of flowing rivers of cash, one hundred thousand motor vehicles, and the towering penthouses of profligacy from the last twenty-three years, there were the many Guyanese who must have felt like Adam and Eve: they had no clothes, shared a banana, and were brainwashed to believe that this is what paradise is supposed to be.
Next, back then from the 1960s and coming forward, there was excessive alcohol consumption; it was manly, cultural, and fraternal. But unlike today, where the degree of consumption is so much worse because of the endless smart money, there was very little underage drinking, and domestic abuse did not reach the acutely problematic levels existing now.
Sticking with the mind altering, there was neither narcotics nor ‘narcotocracy’ back in the bad old days of the PNC. And when the halcyon days of the PPP are identified and recalled, relative to the presence of narcotics, the only utterance forthcoming is: Oh, lawd!
Now if someone had mentioned money laundering during the hazy Burnham days, the automatic question would have been: what is that? Well, that was there and then; this is here and now, where money laundering is an intrinsic pillar in the settled culture of deception and a major underground contributor to the local economy.
Speaking of deception, if the citizens now standing openly for the brigadier and his boisterous band had voted accordingly on May 11, the result would have been an 80% landslide at a minimum. A supermajority would be in hand to implement any number of changes. This is one aspect of the unchanging local reality – deception. Men would do anything to get ahead.
Post-May 11 deception is best emblematized by the latest urban legend (self-promoting, self-loving) who is a yute maan, a PPP maaan, and a guvament maan by turns. Although this fine citizen is the object of widespread ridicule and much societal contempt, there continues the incessant public lobbying for opportunity. But there is a seamier side to this one-man political seesaw: It is that this is one public face that masks the many that prefer to operate clandestinely, who are the same secretly. A simple question arises: can a society be erected on a foundation of men made of sand and straw?
In the same vein, men of a certain hue cry openly against corruption, and against the previous government. Still, if the post-election numbers are of any tonnage, they had neither the stomach nor guts nor conviction to go that one final fateful step and vote for the coalition. In view of such refusal amongst the anti-corruption sentinels to go all the way, they have contributed unwittingly to the spurious claims about election rigging. For all the loud palaver, it becomes clear that as harrowing as the PPP was to the anti-corrupt, it was not frightening enough; and by the same token any other political entity (ex-PPP) promised to be even more fearsome.
As for race relations, suffice it to state that things were terrible in days of yore; today, matters raw and naked have been mangled to the unrecognizable. This culminated in various ways and at many forums during early 2015, and along with that comes, perhaps, a stark poignant irreversibility in this bitterest of bitter chalices. Even at its lowest ebb and the sharpest turmoil, there was never the enveloping spectre, the fuelling, and the distinct possibility of national cataclysm. Such was the extent of the bottled rage sensed. The precipice did stare.
As for the environment, once there was pride, and its roots lay in substantial training, regardless of who was in power. Respect others, respect self, clean-up after self, and the rest will follow; we lived it and saw it didn’t we? There is nothing left to say on this score.
Against the very old and the most recent, the opportunistic and the devious, I must ask: does this society stand a chance? Can President Granger and his team tame the turbulent tides first, and then rise above the unclear currents while lifting the rest of the nation too? And last can we find it within ourselves to overcome ourselves?
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
