Dear Editor,
Remember I am saying so from today: this contentious Guyana Press Association one ain’t over, baby. Give it another couple of years so that the eggs set today can properly hatch. They will, trust me, on this one.
Buys time to set up things better, line up people more nicely, and negotiate surrounding circumstances to suit objectives. All this brings me to the basics: is there anything at all on which we can agree? That first person plural pronoun (‘we’ and I hope I didn’t embarrass myself) is defined as the PPP Government, and the rest of Guyana. Here is a better one for all of us to chew on: is there nothing, that one special something, some extraordinary one or group in the local environment that doesn’t cause the PPP a world of worry? Now that I am on a roll, here is a common one for the PPP top brass, a little FDR. There is nothing to fear but fear itself. Fraud may be feared, but truth and justice and the good ole Guyanese way should not be.
Perhaps, a personal experience from my time Stateside may help shed some clarity. There was the World Trade Center, and then came September 11, 2001. Though two decades later, matters are still as crystal as yesterday. Foreign students from certain parts, looking a certain way, speaking in some funny manner were not all deported. I didn’t stop flying my several business roundtrips a month, some domestic, some foreign. Was never stopped and frisked, never searched. There was neither detention nor interrogation nor separation, whether primary or secondary. Not of person, not property. And there no qualification for the WASP exceptionalism, so treasured in American high society.
This is the one word key: trust. It was what made America great, and long before some New York headcase thought it had to be so again. Now I am getting warmer, and have reserved a special gift for Drs. Ali and Jagdeo, my illustrious Guyanese brothers. Societies erected on a foundation of distrust diminish into decay all too easily, since there is nothing of substance to bind it together in shared beliefs, mutual values. Money can’t buy. Cash can’t slow the slide nor help it to hide. Maybe, it helps for me to say this differently, so I take another stab. Societies struggling with low levels of trust as a staple, never do better than being backward ones. No matter the 22nd century projects, and similar such monuments to help spending keep pace with accounting.
A clue is given to smooth the swallowing of what is sure to be bitter medicine for my doctor brothers. When citizens are beaten down, or culled and coopted into the humiliation of dismal submission, there is not the requisite pride, not the feelings of genuinely belonging, not that which takes from the place that is inhabited to any level besides backward. This is what is happening with one institution of reckoning in this country after another, with the Guyana Press Association being the latest in a long line, compliments of the wunderkinds in the PPP. Will somebody listen in this country, somebody in the PPP?
Why was so much non fossil energy, limited manpower, strapped judicial resources, among others, used up to stop the GPA, as peopled? Oh! And those accusations and their counters. At this rate, we are fast mutating into society harbouring pungent vindictiveness in many forms, to many degrees, and of great enduring power. Okay, Sunday may have been the first unsuccessful PPP foray into the managing and muzzling of an essential area of service and triage in Guyana. Yeah, that would be the Fourth Estate. If today, the emphasis and drive is to manage news, tomorrow the PPP’s focus could depart dangerously into attempting to manage the minds of Guyanese. My word! There would be less than honesty from this quiet corner, if the assertion is there are no worries. Once the material is managed, and the mind too, then next up has to be the street. This is what is so, er, alarming.
Now, I have these parting ones for Drs. Ali and Jagdeo. When only hucksters, schemers, operators, players, and pushovers are recruited to be bosom companions, then that is paying for love. Forget the Beatles and the Mighty Sparrow. What results is an incoherent, insipid, and (since it has to be said, I will say it), and idiotic society. It would be backward as backward gets. And all the treasures of the Atlantic would not be sufficient to make a difference. It is a more recommended course to leave the people in the GPA to go about their business in the ways best known to them. Perhaps the next time that truism of rhythm and blues will come to pass for the PPP: later will be greater. By then, Guyana would be too far gone down the same bad, ole PPP road that nobody would give a damn. Tender loving care, that is, Drs. Ali, Jagdeo. Apologies, but I have one more: the goonish will never make Guyana great, measure the risks and restraining factors, folks. They just don’t have what it takes to lift up.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
