Dear Editor,
I’m not a pessimist but a realist. Before the 2015 elections, I enjoyed listening to Sam Cooke’s ‘Change is gonna come.’ And I want so badly to believe it, but I don’t. I can’t. I need help believing it because I’m losing faith. And faith is being replaced by fear.
It’s been a long, long time, I’ve been waiting for a change to come to Guyana. In the last six months, I’ve been looking for at least a sign of change, but I don’t see it. And now I’m beginning to lose hope and faith.
Editor, someone says, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” But I am beginning to have doubts that hope is a good thing and that it’ll not die. I look for hope but it is not there. I look for opportunities but they are not there. I look for the future but it too isn’t there.
Editor, is a change going to come? Everybody keeps telling me to give it time. But I look at the high levels of crime and suicide, and and the great moral decline. I don’t believe more time will make a difference. And while the promises of a “good life” seem so far away, despondency feels so much closer. I see the politicians getting richer and the rest of the people getting poorer, and I ask myself, where’s the change?
Following the elections, we still have women jumping off Kaieteur Falls. We still have underage girls being sex-trafficked. We still have new born babies falling off beds at GPHC. We still have mothers dying giving birth. We still have women dying from domestic violence. We still have unapologetic arrogant politicians in leadership.
Editor, when is the change coming? All I’m saying is that I want to see a change. I want to be able to sing a new song: ‘Wonderful World.’
Yours faithfully,
Anthony Pantlitz
