Dear Editor,
Almost a decade ago, I described this lovely land of ours as a “cesspool” a national one. Nearly a decade later, I am pained to report that this country called Guyana, which we love so dearly has deteriorated to even worse than where I had placed it, and for which some took serious offence. I must wonder where they stand now, since what we exist in up to our necks is now a confirmed graveyard erected over a toxic dumpsite.
It is a graveyard for issues that are buried furiously and reflexively. Anything that menaces the party heroes worshipped is condemned and attempted to be killed on the spot, through using any of a variety of tools at the disposal of mindless, characterless, shameless messengers. Any effort to bring some semblance of discipline and order to the individual and collective sordidness is resisted, evaded, ignored. The Ethnic Relations Commission and the Integrity Commission stand as partial failures to once positive visions and thoughtful intentions.
The leaders of the pack of people, in disobedience and unruliness, form a pantheon of the underhanded, the unsavory, and the unappealing. They include government ministers, social media commentators, senior political campaigners (from the two major blocs) and those who invade and infest the pages of print media. This society is subject to the self-evident bombardment of uninterrupted brainwashing that reminds me of communist environments. The men from one side are so good that the make the Kremlin(ers) look decidedly clownish. It is a remarkable case of the students outperforming their shady secretive masters in the arts of deception, through the sorceries from sinister heaths of darkness, and in the persuasive fashion (to the naïve and gullible) of tried and true obeah men. The advent of the internet with its guaranteed anonymity has provided the dens and diabolical spaces in which they linger and from they roam in unchecked exuberance.
On both the government and opposition sides, there are these men and women-patriots, they claim-who look for any angle, explore any opportunity, and seize any situation to transform it into the rancid, the divisive, and the unconstructive. They hold out dogmeat as sweetmeat in loud and insistent sales jobs intended to mislead, to corral, and then to cripple and poison. They make mincemeat of the many. Look and there is the evidence: the new parties struggle for room and breath, for the traction of a seat. Yet this is a society that says it is disgusted, it is angry, it desires meaningful change. Now who are the largest liars, the most fulsome of frauds? To ask and answer, it is those who are more schooled than the lying politicians in the fine and gloriously successful skills associated with sleights-of-hand.
And that is why the political blood feuds have intensified into racial shouting matches, the ugly urban and rural sprawl that converts this land that buries itself into the open pit that is this vast national graveyard. An evil wind blows from within the walking tombs and living sepulchres that are the hubristic peoples of this land. They do not want to hear of anything that is not tribal or racial or of blind obeisance to the cult leaderships; they will defend to the last. Those messengers offering a different text, a cooler temperature, will be gored and maimed, if only to maintain the facades, the tawdry, and what is foul.
It is said that all is fair in love and war. By now, it is clear that, in Guyana, politics is war by another name. It is a dirty war. The time for the phony one to be over draws near. The brigades of the faithful and foolish have been summoned and have declared themselves ready. And already, they have provided hints as to the road that may be traveled, if the greatest of restraints are not observed. This is what the ERC grapples with, which the sides of the divide have mocked and plot to mangle in the days ahead.
I hear big people speaking of the constitution. That ragged document is the epitome, the very essence, of the cesspool cum graveyard that deadens further our morbid existence. The tiniest of openings, invisible to most, are plunged through and widened for nefarious purposes by legal and political carrions that either perpetuate old mischiefs or perpetrate new ones. Leaders are delighted at their discoveries; citizens are delirious; and the supposed brain trusts stand as monuments to what is massively destructive and degrades still more monstrously. There is no allowance nor welcome for neutrals or centrists, with the worst kind being the racial betrayers, who go against their own. They are unforgivable, cardinal sinners condemned to eternal social purgatory.
This is what sells here, is beloved here, is worshipped here. This is what has succeeded for eons. And this is the landfill and dumpsite on which we build and leverage for the future. May God bless Guyana with such wonderful folks in the milieu. I have the funny feeling that God has run out of blessings for here; or that he has forgotten that this place still exists and abandoned it totally.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
