Dear Editor,
I watch events unfold, and crash one into another with unremitting intensity. No matter how civil the surface, there is sharp grounded hostility, too. Most people see some of the things I see and fear. Few take the time to grasp the powerful sinister undercurrents that are not so readily discernible. Those who do prefer not to speak of that old dirty Guyanese secret; it is one that now rages with increasing abandon.
Whether name or list or protest, the story is the same; whether rejection of offerings or embrace of renewed reenergized thrusts into the diseased fabric of an exhausted culture, the same unforgiving road is being travelled. Always it haunts; always it traps and paralyses. So it will be: the promise of the present, the gloomy peril of the future. There is little interest in extrication.
Here is a nation shrivelled by addiction; cold turkey is called for, and all it ever tries is the hair of the rabid dogs that bit. The resolve is flabby; there is no steel to face demons that terrorize and lay low. Hence, there is the circle of a society that traces and retraces the same arc that invariably leads right back to the same sorry starting point. It is from nowhere to nowhere. There is nothing of substance in between, save for the accumulated spiritual and psychic malignancies. It is where this nation finds itself forever, when all the screaming and resisting and angling and positioning are analyzed, it is where things stand. That such malignancies hurt do not matter; that they enfeeble is inconsequential; and that they poison and imprison brings none of the clinical self-examination and self-criticism so desperately needed, or with any of the much desired self-improved following.
Meanwhile, the air thickens with old familiar refrains: crises; manufactured crises; one-term; positioning; and rigging. The early first half of 2015 saw troubling fateful descents; the later second half of this decade edges determinedly towards menacing testing grounds, all mined, and all automatically and remotely timed.
Perhaps things are not so remote after all, even from the uncertain meteorology of now. The centre columns and building stones are powerfully erected and embedded. There is a whole lot of shaking coming this way. There is some shivering too. As the travails mount, it has not been mentioned yet, but this society is fighting for its life. It is not in any final throes, but the breathing is hard and heavy; the beat alarming.
As the pivotal third year draws near, eyes and hearts (and calculations) have already pole vaulted into the time and distance beyond. The groundwork is feverish all around. Some are being used and do not realize this; many do not care. The stakes and expectations are high as to who will prove to be triumphant.
In the tumult of shouting, there is no listening; when there is no listening, there can be no understanding; where there is no understanding, there is neither compromising nor accepting nor even tolerating. Democracy is too porous a shield, too flimsy a partition, and too fickle a presence to serve as the transcendent difference maker here. One way or another, the supercharged atmosphere points a single irrefutable fact: a reckoning is coming.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
