Dear Editor,
The call has come again for government and opposition to reach across and reach out to each other for the sake of the peoples they represent, and the nation’s future. For some that call is always present in mind and heart, no matter how muted, how feeble, how resisted where it counts. And it is resisted, for when examined there is little genuine interest and much less zeal for that which could erect a true nation on a foundation of stone.
There have been leaders and opposition leaders before, just as those who answer to those respective responsibilities today. There have been, too, oceans of words and declared intentions. But when the crescendos of sounds and ostensibly noble postures are compressed and minimized to their core, there is the same tiring, unfulfilling, damning realities. The hard jarring realities are: me and mine; us not them; and all or none.
It goes without saying that these undeniable political and environmental realities are denied vigorously in sometimes honey-laced rhetoric, sometimes otherwise. Yet the facts and circumstances expose relentlessly; the past and the present grind out harsh indisputable truths; and the future already haunts.
It haunts because there are men and women at every tier of the sordid political circles who possess the same shortsighted and self-aggrandizing, but ultimately self-defeating mindset that pays short shrift to the nation’s welfare. There is little by way of contributory intellect, guiding spirituality, and the backbone of requisite political character to liberate from the morass of unyielding impasse. Where such defining attributes should exist, there is only emphasis and enthusiasm for the self-strengthening and the self-perpetuating to the continuing harm of all else. The nuances of compromises, patient parsing, and of dogged visions, unselfish visions, are just not part of the political fiber, outlook, and again character. The powerful determinations and forces needed so urgently to extricate and carry beyond are missing; instead there are arrayed against the constructive, the obvious, and the necessary in the ongoing condition of survival of the slickest. Well, so they believe.
Leaders are fueled or stymied by insiders who are mainly about the self-serving, and the inward looking. Those same insiders possess a rigid unswerving mindset: get what can be had; get for self; get now; get all. This is the totality of the thoughtfulness and the resourcefulness that prevails; it is the creativity of cabals near at hand and cults farther afield. There is neither incentive nor imperative to try the untried to discover the different. There is only the failed regrettable formula of 50% plus one, which is in effect 50% minus one to those on the outside. This is the essence of celebration, a basis for separation, and a justification for continuation, as has always been the case. It is no different today, be it those waited upon; or those waiting for a return. Even from the eyeglass perch of now, return and returns are bound to be riddled with controversy and the disputatious.
With all this being the case, this Guyana stands as a tragic case; clearly, a basket case, but an embraced one. For in this hodgepodge of peoples, still undecided-and perhaps uncommitted-as to nationhood, or what is takes to be get there, there is that debilitating hemorrhage called brain drain. Except that it is one with a twist. The Guyanese brain drain is not what is lost to capitalist cosmology or siren calls; it is the barren emptiness of a domestic environ devoid of the energy, the devotion, and the electric impulses to want a new way, or to desire to emerge from the pit. The internal brain drain is of the negligence and reckless that leaves brain dead. It has. Thus, there is what there is.
In too many aspects and respects, from leaders to lieutenants to loyalists, from the artful controllers and the willingly controlled, there is this exhibition of all that is wrong and injurious to an already reeling, stricken society. If ever there was a space and place representative of the counterintuitive and counterproductive, Guyana is it in trumps. The crucial counterforce toward the consensus of cooperation is just not there. Thus, the cries and calls continue. They fall. They wither…. They will be uttered again.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
