Copycats and Chinese: When need nurtured pride

-Should “Skibby” Critchlow cry?

I thank you all for allowing me this one-day break today. From the politics, the health issues of His Excellency, the activities of Dr Jagdeo, the government public relations efforts and some social media partisan rants; from our society’s daily murders, frauds, traffic fatalities, cocaine trafficking and rape reports.

Whew! I leave all the above today to other commentators, columnists and philosophers. Instead I share with you my long persistent concern with the seeming – or obvious (?) – dilution or disappearance of too many vestiges of the culture that once fashioned our identity as one distinctive (type) of people.

Not an academic, I define culture to mean simply all that which is grounded in our approaches to and manifestation of our collective life. So my meaning of “culture” embraces our evolved faiths and other beliefs, our unique versions of food and recipes, songs, dance, early folkloric/creole traditions and even our ethnic/racial mixtures and admixtures who comprise that national demographic known as “Guyanese.”