‘One big family’

Dear Editor,

I have just come off the Caribbean Airlines flight BW600 between Timehri and Toronto during which I read the airline’s current magazine titled Caribbean Beat in which there was an inspiring article featuring a speech given by the all-time great visionary, Rev Dr Martin Luther King, some 50 years ago in Jamaica focusing on the Jamaican motto: “Out of many, One people.”

The strong, direct, immediate resonance of MLK’s half-century old message (which incidentally also echoes similar themes by the revered Mahatma Gandhi and the indomitable Nelson Mandela, with the exhortations of our own newly sworn-in President David Granger this week, compelled my penning this piece as a reminder to my compatriots.

As reported, MLK was as impressed by Jamaica as the Jamaicans were charmed by him. He remarked repeatedly on the fact that in Jamaica “the people are from many nations: Chinese, Indians, so-called Negroes and you can go down the line, people from many, many nations who all live there with the Jamaican motto foremost in their behaviour: ‘Out of many people, one people’…and they say, ‘Here in Jamaica we are not Japanese, we are not Chinese, we are not Indians, we are not Negroes, we are not Englishmen, we are not Canadians, but we are one big family of Jamaicans.’”

Can we hope and pray that like MLK did for all the races that live in the USA to be Americans, that we in Guyana can become one big family of Guyanese.

And while we are at it we may also consider the other theme stressed by our keen President Granger which also reflects on that of the visionary Dr Martin Luther King who urged his Jamaican audience to excel in whatever field was theirs when he said: “If it falls to our luck to be street cleaners, clean the streets like Raphael painted pictures, like Michelangelo carved marble, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, and like Beethoven composed music. Clean the streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth would have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street cleaner.’”

Yours faithfully,

Nowrang Persaud