OPINION: I am yet to see something, a result, in which I can believe, what I could support

Last Updated on Monday, 16 March 2020, 15:17 by Writer

by GHK Lall

I watch and wonder as results come and results go, amidst the ongoing rages and willful blindness of a society that has succeeded in tearing itself apart at every joint, and limb by limb. I absorb repeated court decisions and repeated additions that lead nowhere, other than further down into the pits of this purgatory in which we wallow, in which we thrive. What I share today would not be received favorably by anybody. I have neither care nor concern over that, for that is part of the whimsical and capricious—indeed, the arbitrary—which now entombs this nation. I must be true to myself.

I no longer have any patience, nor any interest, in what emerges from this fiasco cum disaster cum tragedy in the making called final official elections outcome. I could care less who wins, who ascends victoriously; that means nothing to me now. What I do know, as I have said repeatedly, is that when an eventual winner is declared, that all of Guyana would lose and lose unimaginably. That may not matter to all of the rest of Guyana, but it does to me. For I must be true to what I stand for, what I believe in, and what I would like to think that I represent.

To take a step back in this most unrighteous and unhearing of milieus, I voted for the coalition. I want to see it emerge victorious. But I want to see it do so cleanly, persuasively, and irrefutably. I wish for a process with which I am able to live with a clean conscience before my small family, my religious family, my national family. I desire to be in a position where I can stand for any result, for any party, and say: I am satisfied. I can be a part of these numbers, these arrangements, these results that come. Let us go forth. But I can’t.

I don’t think we are there at all; I don’t think that we are anywhere near to approaching such a place where results are credible now. This is the most painful of ironies, since we are so physically close to what should be, what needs to be, but what is not to be, when the contributions from both sides left standing leave so much to be desired, leading to a wide world of disputed issues that have been unanswered and as they remain unsolved.

For what we have is not convincing, and I take the broadest view from my increasingly greater distance from process and people and passions. I insist that what we have had is not convincing in the least: not in form, not in substance, not in methodology, and not in what is presented to us as our electoral tabula rasa. It is anything but.

And I as a citizen, a believer and servant, a re-migrant, and a public contributor, cannot and will not be a part of that which is tainted. For I sense that what is tainted is not at the margins, but in the very foundations and compilations of what have brought us to this ugliest and most hateful of spaces. It is most distasteful to me and rises to all that I find despicable. Now I am looking at all our leaders; every single one of them, and I question: is this what we have to lead us forward in some fashion? Is this the grandeur and depths of wisdom and profoundness that is supposed to take us someplace? What place could that possibly be now? What heights could we ever aspire to now, given what has unfolded and did unravel us in the unconstructive and untouchable shreds into which we have made of ourselves?

I cannot be a part of any such thing, any such development. To be utterly candid, I have no joy, no spirit, in being a part of such a people, of such a society and with racially leprous peoples anymore. No! I cannot. But that is my burden to bear; my vision made approximately forty years ago, and my decision finalized and deployed almost a decade back, with which I have to coexist. I shall overcome the challenges of my conscience, my circumstances, and my country. The latter certainly has a raw and bitter taste. Where can it go after this? How can it be, in whatever shape does it exist hereafter?

I hang my head in what we have become in the powerful evidence of how we have always been, only infinitely, more unbelievably worse now. That is part of my problem: I believed. I can pick up the pieces. The question is: can the peoples of this country ever be able to do so? I don’t think so. I don’t think this country has any inclination towards any such vision. I don’t think it is capable of healing itself, of reconciling with itself. And since this is where our processes and papers (however managed and counted and recorded) have brought us, then I want no part of it.

And now I must go.

Mr GHK Lall is a Guyanese author, columnist and former financial analyst on Wall Street.