Dear Editor,
I never cease to be amazed at Guyanese. The selective nature of our anger, disgust, and sharp steely reactions to things that are partisan. Yet we stand as statues of indifference when the whole country we say that we love, the government that we definitely adore, and our own individual dignity are all unpardonably insulted. Where our rage is then, and where is our sense of vilification and violation?
Editor, I am writing of what occurred re Superior Concrete, Inc., and at the hands of two of its senior officials. Officials of a state agency were humiliated to their faces and in full public view. Then, to top it all off, and as if that was not enough and that a certain kind of degrading putdown had to be delivered, a minister of the national government, a lawmaking member of our parliament, and an accompanying Chief Executive Office, also of a state entity, were made a mockery of, and demeaned in way that I would not have thought likely. Who is running this country? Who is significant and who is supplicant? Who and which place is considered so low on the totem pole that they are not worthy of any minimum courtesy? As I gather it, that would be us (me and you); and I don’t like that one bit. No sir, not this Guyanese!
That is me, but where are the other outraged Guyanese? Where are they, when one of their own is embarrassed like this? Where is the galloping swiftness to denounce in the loudest terms? Is it because what happened lacks partisan stings and torments? Is it because it is first a white man that did the dirty deed? And then quickly and even more outrageously followed by another foreigner worshipped? I was expecting the rafters to come off, with Guyanese scribes and Guyanese pundits rushing to the front to show some sort of support and solidarity for one of us. Where are the partisans and their righteous indignations that their own minister has had his face dragged in the mud?
Editor, it seems that we are the exemplification of casualness, when a foreigner is sharing the licks and trashing us like yesterday’s garbage. But when it has got the suspected racial element and the ugly political ingredients, then the battleaxes come out from the woodwork. That is what galvanizes us into action; that is what electrifies us with a jolt from our mentally comforting caves. It is no wonder that we brutalize one another effortlessly. Yet we shrink from venting our anger at what is insulting and diminishing to the nation.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall