Every five years, many Guyanese don red and black or green (now green and yellow) shades that do not allow them to see anything objectively. Of course, this is with reference to elections and it mostly happens during general and regional elections. While this pattern has been observed during local government elections, it is not as rampant or at least not to the extent that it dominates reason and threatens anarchy like it does during general elections.
It does not matter that it is only some of us who perpetuate this foolishness, because those who do, including so-called leaders, do so spectacularly, making the news or making up the news, so to speak. The result of wearing these blinding blinkers is a sad state of affairs for the country that sets it back every time, economically and socially. Every intelligent Guyanese adult knows this to be fact, yet every general election season we allow things to spiral out of control. In our continuing effort to attain democracy, we tend to fall prey to demagogues whose ploys to obtain or retain power include factionalism and resorts to racism and hatred, a dangerous state of affairs as both history and present-day events show us.
According to its definition, democracy, simply put, is rule by the people. But it would be impossible for all of the people to rule, so this is done through representatives put in place by way of a system of set periodic elections. All the people do not have to agree on who the representatives are, just a majority. And because elections are periodically held, the people have the opportunity to vote out those representatives who they believe have not been doing a good or good enough job and replace them with others who they believe do better. There are other complexities of course, but that is fundamentally what democracy is will.
Political leaders have failed to educate the masses on what true democracy means or what it is or perhaps have deliberately miseducated them. People who know better would not continue to allow flawed representatives to speak for them simply because they looked like them. They would not believe they would fare better because their government was led by a party appearing to cater more to one race than the other. Right-thinking people would not align themselves with anything or anyone that even appeared to be racist and for the most part, right-thinking people have. We can deduce, therefore, that there are not enough right-thinking people in this land as if there were, things would surely have been different.
As long as Guyanese continue to allow themselves to be misled, the country will never truly attain democracy. At this point in time, we are barely managing to hang on to suffrage as it would seem that there is nothing sacred in the struggle for power and no depths to which some politicians would not sink.
There is a saying often attributed to Albert Einstein, but which was actually first coined by mystery writer Rita Mae Brown in 1983: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results”. The rhetoric used by men and women from the two major parties during the political campaigns ought to have given us a clue that nothing had or was about to change. And yet, insanely, for the most part, people, Guyanese, listened, absorbed, acted and reacted. It is like watching a particularly bad puppet show, except that all that has happened is very real and perhaps the only blameless parties are the ones who got few to no votes.
Every general election season, citizenry allow themselves to abide in a haze of ‘we’ versus ‘them’. And when the dust settles it becomes more and more difficult to return to just being ‘us’, when the reality is that we need each other to survive. No man is an island, nor is any one party, faction, or race capable of going it alone, not if democracy is the goal. While we appear to revel in regression every five years, we have to ask ourselves exactly what the goal is and when will we, all of us, collectively, put nation above self.
