Dear Editor,
The time for talking and writing is over. So, too, I would submit is any lingering residual moment of pondering before deciding. Monday comes striding in as E-Day Guyana, the D-Day of our existence, the possible freedoms held by the paradox of our promising but painful future. All of the probing and reacting, the contradicting and challenging, the comparing and projecting, are now over. It is now time to vote to determine where we proceed from here, and how.
I have no interest today in writing about which leader or group is more meritorious, more deserving, more capable; the minefields of those dangerous territories have been covered and recovered. We are long past that stage as a society and as single eligible agents. Truth be told that bombarded stage was solidified in the iron textures of hearts and minds made up, even before late December 2018. That parliamentary moment, now etched in cement, was merely the catalyst that exposed us for who and how we are at the immovable centres of our tormented, limited existence. In the year and three months since then, the vast raw canvas has been of the wreckage of what we have grown into more disastrously, what is left of us, and what we insist on being, despite the agonies of these sorry truths. No! I have no interest in traveling that road again.
Today, I prefer to articulate and set before my fellow Guyanese what could possibly be if (if) we would care to be mature and responsible; as well as civilized and constructive. Though there is much ongoing dismay, many times disgust from the fierce internal struggles, I have to be optimistic; because if I were to lack that defining human quality, then I may as well cease to exist. Thus, I say to the troubled peoples – brothers all – in this battered land: this is what we must seek to do; this is what we have to strive with single-minded determination to be: that is, to do our part to contribute positively to this society’s existence as a viable polity, an assembly of citizens of some sort, that is focused on a common encircling, enhancing destiny.
What does this mean? It means that, at the individual and group levels, we must temper ourselves, possess the self-control, and manifest the required regard for those with whom we disagree, we dispute, we dismiss, and we cast into that ever-present convenient divide. It would be the height of irresponsibility and an inexcusable evasion, if I were not to assert that we are so constructed, and our minds not so powerfully concentrated on what should be the common, universal destiny. This is to my pain, my sorrow, my regret.
Today, therefore, I plead for tomorrow. I must. After tomorrow, I urge all to be engaged enough to dive deeply inward to discover and kindle the graces that could lead to sanity not savagery; to the positive possibilities and not the degrading devastations; and to progressing past our substantial disfigurements, instead of reinforcing them. This would only come from pausing during the hurricanes of elections season to be open to that tiniest of spaces within, to incline ear for that different whisper, and then actually to hear it and do something about its message. The message from me to my fellow Guyanese is this: take a stand against the hysterias and passions that imperil; take a stand for the extended family, that is, of country.
I charge all Guyanese to respect the rights of assumed adversaries by being responsible; be restrained, be sober, be about the obligations of democratic and spiritual citizenship of a different kind from what we have known. I suspect, even fear, that hard heads and harder hearts will reign supreme and dismiss out of hand. Still, I must persist.
And thus I reach for those with higher learnings from this life, those with broader insights, those with more human and more altruistic instincts to give free rein to the nobler rather than the baser impulses that lurk inside and always threaten to overpower the best of intentions. I call upon peers to burnish and deploy intellect and experience and energies towards what is better for this country, and for brethren without exception.
Even as I place this before contemporaries, I recognise that in the combustible cauldron of contest – the life and death competition for ascendancy and power – that these thoughts of mine for the temperate most likely will bounce off the steel trapdoors of minds firmly bent a
certain way or, worse yet, irreversibly shut and locked. Nevertheless, I must persevere before those interested enough, caring enough, and willing enough to be leaders in that which takes to another place.
There is not much else left to share. All has been said and argued and condemned. This is where we are today. I trust that tomorrow and thereafter could signal a new and bright Guyana: one of high ground; one of more settled fellowship; and one grateful for its many gifts and for its many sons and daughters. I go forth to whatever comes. May it be to a better place, through a better passage that ushers to realising the best of our potentials.
My parting word is this: as rights are exercised, there are obligations that come with them, which are inseparable and nonnegotiable. I look on high and whisper: watch over this process, watch over this country, watch over all of us.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
