Dear Editor,
Someone called me at 6.43 on Tuesday last and pointed me to a column titled, ‘I find the GHK Lalls of this world reprehensible’ (KN, April 17). My response will be brief.
I seem to recall dismissing (dismissing) the writer a while back. This is what is done to children, especially those that lack basic decency and training and honesty. Now I regret that I have to venture into the gutter that has become part of the local lifeblood and so dominant in the national mainstream. I feel stained and tainted and utterly disgusted. Is this what this country has become? Is this the emblematizing of national pastimes dedicated to malice, putridity, vulgarity, the dishonourable, the sickening, and so much more under the guise of journalism and public commentary? Again, what kind of country is this? What kind of society is it that spawns this degree of ugliness, lunacy, and embedded leprosy?
I used to speak regularly of a national political leader that I believe is unhinged and so wrong for this land. For a long time I have recognized his twin in the realm of a newspaper. For the record, I make one thing straight and for whatever it is worth: I have never met or spoken to Mr Anand Persaud, Editor-in-Chief of SN; I have shared two quick interactions years ago with Mr Andre Haynes at the home of now Justice Gino Persaud. I think I owe that to both of them.
Also, in this very year I was asked by KN to assist with writing editorials; I did one and then had to withdraw due to time conflicts. There must be something that I bring to the table, this stranger, this outsider, this foreign presence, this enigma, and this bone in the throat of the narcissistic. It certainly generates visceral hatreds; I must be careful. Man, that boy does have a lot of poisons inside! And when that is coupled to a troubled paranoiac state, that can be dangerous. I seek distance as the sane does from rabid curs.
In closing, I confess to making one terrible mistake a while back: I credited the writer with a mind. I recognize the enormity of that error. Let me be absolutely clear: this is not a citizen who has lost his mind. Far from it, for that assumes that there was one to begin with. For the first and last time: dismissed.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
