Dear Editor,
I thank you for allowing me to use this medium, perhaps for the final time, to air this personal dilemma. Hopefully there would be a few members of our current dot.com generation who can learn something positive from it.
What am I going on about? It has to do with old-time morality and integrity – actually the moral dilemma of supporting elections rigging and electoral thievery. Either because you love and want “your own” in government badly, or you have little or no problem with dishonesty, theft, stealing.
Seventy years ago my grandmother, like all “ole people” of that era, instilled in me that “honesty is the best policy.” My generation grew up with that value despite need and near-poverty. (There was also the fear of God – who was always watching us!) So up to today I do not embrace stealing.
Yet I grew up to become a PNC (People’s National Congress) member in 1973. Knowing full well that from 1968 – up to 1985 – that Party won government through rampant electoral engineering. I have continually explained my then PNC support in recent months. These days I disdain electoral thievery. I suppose it has to do with some retained code of values – integrity – which solidifies with advanced age. Even the PNC veteran Hamilton Green once spoke of the national need for “a moral and spiritual revival.” Of course he was/is the most inappropriate messenger!
Against the above context then Editor, I grapple with the fact that in Parliament and within our population there are a few thousand citizens who support and embrace those who tried desperately to rig their way into government and perpetual power. Because “is we own”, is “we Party against de others.” Damn morality and integrity!
In some societies the populace live by force under dictatorships or under governments who attained power by coups. Some are comfortable because they benefit from electoral thievery. Today’s values – or lack of morality – accommodate living with dishonesty, thievery, corruption. Today’s generation “goes with the flow.” Even the artificial church-going is compromised by the successful hustle led by “we own.”
My own political epiphany came a bit late. Or just in time – before I depart here permanently. I am no racist, no PPP, no PNC now. So I bemoan mass acceptance of political wrong-doing. It is with anxiety I expect(?) or await missteps – even excesses – from this “new PPP”. But how should I respond to, deal with all my dressed-up, well-spoken comrades who condoned attempts to steal the people’s will? And how do they feel about themselves within the National Assembly and in society? A new morality beckons and envelopes, I suppose. Power, authority, status – all trump integrity. Our new world?
Yours faithfully,
Allan Arthur Fenty
