Dear Editor,
I cannot say, 50 years later, that my brain is in any way as good as it was when I was 20 years old, when I felt that I could understand, grasp and learn anything and everything. Not now! I have recently been reading, with some difficulty and, no doubt, much misunderstanding, articles on potentially amazing Quantum Computers.
Quantum effects are, indeed, mysterious, and out of this world – seems that quantum effects/thinking allow something to be a solid mass/thing, and a wave (no mass) at the same time; and it may be in many places at the same time; and as we try to ‘know’ it, we fix it into one particular thing and place, depending on what we do to ‘know.’ It is not that things are not what they seem, but that they may be any of the many things that they seem.
I got a feeling of quantum effects as I read two letters in the October 7, 2014, edition of the Stabroek News. I do not know how many of you might have noticed the two letters, titled ‘Examples of the new society develop in the old’ by Brother Eusi Kwayana, and ‘Please stay, don’t go’ by Brother GHK Lall.
The two letters present and engender two completely different views and attitudes about Guyana and Guyanese. Can Guyana and Guy-anese be opposite things at one and the same time? GHK Lall speaks about “every segment, every layer, every area in this country, exhibiting a terrible, embedded ‘sickness’ in how we deal with each other.” Brother Eusi Kwayana writes that “it [the visit to the Doobay Renal Treatment Centre at Annandale] was not the only uplifting visit of my visit. Truly, there were two or three others.” Seems like Guyana and Guyanese, at one and the same time, are many possible things, and in knowing and reporting on Guyana and Guyanese, we could be fixed on, or helped to be, one of the many possibilities. Observing and reporting are not without determinating effect; nothing is without effect!
Both Brothers Lall and Kwayana are ‘right’ in the observations that they report. I would like to urge Brother GHK Lall to warn, but not to lose faith, despite the observed behaviour that he laments. Guyanese are not being anything but human.
A common feature in the dozen, or so, religious holidays that we enjoy each year, is that ‘good’ will prevail over ‘evil.’ The yearnings to do good and the yearnings to do evil, are ever present in humans. Evil – the tendency to do evil – in not ever des-troyed.
In our small population, still at an early stage of social evolution, all relationships are personal, or expected to be personal; no anonymity for us; we are moved by emotions. If our spirit takes to the person, we can make miracles of a certain kind, happen: things can be made to have happened even years earlier, if needed; and if our spirits do not ‘take,’ nothing will happen at any foreseeable time in the future. One can have experiences that are most unhelpful and degrading. Brother Eusi, noting and reporting on an uplifting experience, could contribute to a movement in that direction, away from what Brother Lall laments as might be prevailing now.
Not all, but many, too many, of our relationships exhibit a ‘sickness’ in how we deal with each other, as Brother Lall laments; we act out to prosper a few, too few, our ‘fambly’ and friends, our group. How to extend our group that we would prosper, to encompass all Guyana? How to get all of us as one ‘fambly.’
If one were to put an arrow on the thousands of years of human history, I would put the continual efforts to extend and maintain an ever-enlarging sense of the group in which we are members, and which we would prosper. One may think of the Romans and their idea of Roman citizenship. In Guyana, I think of Cheddi Jagan’s endeavours to establish Guyanese citizenship amongst our six peoples, positioned in human citizenship, as we would learn in his latter years, in his advocacy for A new global human order.
Stay on the scene!
Keep your eye on a bright future; and that may well be!
Yours faithfully,
Samuel Hinds
Prime Minister
