Dear Editor,
It is said that no news is good news. Then newspapers and televisions would have to go; they are not. I browse the only two dailies, SN and KN, that I read online and on paper. It is of headlines and beyond speedreading. I shudder. I fear. I fear for this country and where it is at, and where it is hellbent on heading. In the cascade of news, it is almost inevitably unwelcoming. Like a shoe several sizes too small. Torturous.
The easier and more straightforward (euphemistically speaking) are tackled first. Venezuela: menacing and alarming. It is a study in calculated belligerence buttressed by unswerving determination. Guyana and its oil dreams resemble an unlocated, untouched, uncashed Grand Irish Sweepstakes. It might as well be that distant, all analyses and noises aside. The rich succulent bird once almost in the hand assumes the outlines of a boa in the bosom. Guyanese fight on: amongst themselves. In hard contrast to my own thinking, positioning, and projecting, embittering local conflict is seen as progressive, the essence of true patriots. I beg to differ; utter scorn is withheld. Yet such clamours and postures, in the midst of looming crises, are considered sacred. In this benighted country backward is forward; the precipice a penthouse in which to cavort in the jigs of the mentally impoverished. I suppose this is Guyana’s own Jazz Age.
I observe the politics and the same mindless degradation festers in sprawling squalor. Nice words, nicer gestures, the nicest countenances allowed. But I do not think that, at the heart of the matter, much, if anything, has changed materially. Not mentally, not internally, not philosophically. Tribally, too; tribally, the unchanging organism and nature that is Guyanese racial politics is considered good news; the best news possible. It is why I welcome the youthful voices probing and questioning the racial status quo; I trust that they are man and woman enough (independent and principled enough) so that this is more than public posturing, and representative of hard distancing from the combustions infused from the cradle. Those slurs come too effortlessly and too young in classroom and schoolyard. And street and village and town, too. I challenge the youths: lay it on the line. Go against the grain of tradition and tribe and time. Let the chips fall. Someplace else with something else. A man-learned, clinical, wise to the world, foreign born and of foreign extraction-articulated publicly that Guyana’s racial problem is of the gravity of the territorial issue. Both can be catastrophic; yet we shrug nonchalantly, dismissively.
Editor, take an honest look: For too long Guyanese politics has been infested with too many antics, critics, mimics, and wasteful decimating tactics. It has been one deceptive red herring after another. There are so many political and social red herrings teeming in Guyana that it can be compared to the Red Sea. There is a conspicuous difference: no parting of the waves. The chariots are massing; cardinal point left unmentioned. We know. We move on. Unconcerned. Unruffled. Unsound in mind; but fortified in spirit. In some unfathomable way, all of this may be considered good news. This is how warped and terminal this society is: the devastating is venerated, evidence of how far this country is imprisoned in the raucousness of its reciprocal resentments and rage. So what? Where is the problem? Perhaps the problem is with the messenger.
Shifting to the social plain, and it is a killing every day; or some level of senseless violence. Although the numbers are harrowingly worse there, I feel that Guyana is not far from Trinidad or Chicago or Baltimore. I recommend the Stabroek Market square to the disbelieving. Even the Cubans wish to go someplace else. This whole country might be a vast inner city (exclusive and gated communities and all); one great emotional and psychological ghetto. I am sure that there are some perturbed by this. The question is: how many? A Surinamese is discovered dead in Berbice. He will go home in a body bag; this brings home here piercingly the narcotics and currency demons let loose on this weak, ailing society. Rather retardedly, those kinds of businesses are quietly longed for: they enrich.
The bad news is that a great swath of society was empowered and entranced by the opportunities and possibilities for social mobility. The worse news is the worship that followed; a sacred space that should be left untouched. That departed soul on the beach, and all the local wounded, dead, and dying on their feet are viewed as acceptable collateral costs. Citizens demonstrate a willingness to pay the price. In fact, large areas of the citizenry yearn for a return of the free trade in drugs and dirty money more than they long for any refurbished reincarnation of the constitution; or even an early resurrection of elections. I will say it here and loudly: if the current government was more understanding, more tolerant, more lenient, and more supportive of the pervasive, uber-saturating narcotics and money laundering industries, it would not be in the predicament, stalemate, and precarious defensive position in which it finds itself. This takes into account its numerous failures and weaknesses.
I search for any silver lining (including imaginary ones); it is an ordeal. Domestic violence incidents are slower and lower; City Hall promises to find its footing and leave a different print; there are whispers of this or that governance structure (the cement has too much sand and too few bricks to bind); civil society ventures forward (was that GAWU?); the English cricketers are here -hope springs. In the midst of the suffocating social smog and impenetrable racial breastplates, it is always warming to encounter the ongoing efforts of philanthropists. Whenever a single day dawns without news reports of either violence or road madness or searing social ugliness, there is slow exhaling. It is a good day to be cherished when it can be had.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall