No matter how often it happens, no matter how much our ears become attuned to the ring of abuse in politics, Guyanese must never allow themselves to become accustomed to it or to be entrapped by it, and to succumb to the temptation of silence. The degeneracy of political and personal abuse has become the hallmark of the PPP’s methodology of political discourse.
Unless it stops, it will intimidate most into silence. For the few who remain courageous enough, they will have to live, as many now do, with a constant, daily, stream of invective about their public and private lives and activities that defies any sense of rationality or decency. Little do the perpetrators understand that it is they, not the victims, whom the degradation eventually consumes. Cheddi Jagan suffered a lifetime of humiliation and abuse. So intense it was, and over so many decades, that it tempted good people to say that history would not have been kind to him. The opposite has happened.
The President, in a moment which he “vaguely remembers,” exposed the sinister grip and origin of the culture of abuse and intimidation when he threatened John Adams who was heckling at a meeting in Aishalton that “Jagdeo” would have slapped him if he were there. The nature of the culture is now clearly in the process of advancing from words to fists. Unless checked, the
