OPINION: To stand for and with teachers is to trample on the children

Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 February 2024, 8:45 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

Democracy is one strange animal, an unending fascination, to be sure.  Perhaps, it is the understanding and practices of democracy in Guyana that are strange, in that they are unique to here.  Many are those who speak of its lofty ideals, its vaunted values.  In harmonious times, those have no opponents.  It is when circumstances are crushing that there can be some differentiating between what is inspiring and what is iniquitous.  Take this teachers’ strike.  Some extol its power, its necessity, the timeliness of its energy, the call for its durability.  Until there is some meeting of the minds, some reciprocal giving.  In contrast, there are those who excoriate those standing for the strikers.  Think of the children, they say.  Those who feast on the fat of the land, suddenly see God, develop a conscience.  We must save the children.

I agree wholeheartedly.  My record stands, and it is more than the free decade given during the tenures of not one, but two different national governments.  Let the record speak its language.  Now in the throes of the strike, I hear those who play the kiddies’ card.  Those who mint a million, or more, from the patrimony of this land, now lecture those standing with and for the struggling to get their penny from that same patrimony.  Please! Don’t tell anyone in Guyana about ethics and morals when there is harvesting of the rewards of this oil.  There are many who are ecstatic and delirious when they are collecting and counting.  To make matters infinitely worse, they count and bank quietly on the sweat, the intellect, of others.  But they are outraged when the gatherings and clamors in the street are for a fair share, a sliver, of this oil that is lavished on others, but not on the ones screaming their tribulations to the world.  Primal screaming.  Hurting, quivering flesh.  They are people too.  Just like the children used as a convenient smokescreen.

The children are summoned into action.  Child soldiers?  Or human shields?  The so-called civilized in the US and UK smoothly forget the children in Gaza, when they turn their faces, and stifle their consciences.  Their tongues wag in a different direction then; it is from side to side with slithery syntax designed to condone, to tone down.  But now there is concern for the children.  When there was no oil and no money and no strike and without a thought to politics, free time was devoted to the children.  Those who did similarly have earned the right to pontificate and attempt to castigate others about the children.  But not those who now prosper from this oil, and take offense that the cries of striking teachers are being heard by all those with an interest in Guyana’s prospects.  Those not of the soil, but with their own Guyana Dream.  Those of the soil, but who move with zest and some vehemence to deny others their dreams, their hopes for a droplet or two from their wealth.

This is the democracy that is so strange.  Those free to rise from the undemocratic results of this oil.  Regardless of the contractual repugnance that desecrates this nation, this government, this opposition, this civil society, and this population.  Speak softly, but carry no cane.  Let it rain.  Let it rain on the favored.  Damn those who speak out in favor of the disfavored.  The arc of the moral compass cringes from the presence of red lines that should not be approached.  Not even in the face of blatant unfairness, rank injustice.  Think of the reputation of Guyana.  Think of the confidence of investors, present and prospective.  Think of the picture being painted in the products sold, and this dreadful contradiction.  The oil paradise is an oil purgatory at the core.  But no! nobody is saying anything of that nature.  They are too damn smart to make that kind of mistake.  There are those who are slick enough to haul the children and use them and stuff them into the consciousness.  Child soldiers for a purpose?  Or, again, human shields, so that others get their bloody way?

In this democracy, the PPP Government desires with a passion that its language be hewed to, embraced, sold.  In this democracy, the PNC Opposition is of the same instinct.  In this democracy, the golden rule is to speak no ill of the ills that saturate the practices of those with power, and those aspiring to power, or some piece of its fruits.  In this democracy, dissent is dangerous.  It is also dark in the schemes of those who seek to grab and grow from this monumental national endowment.  When striking teachers ask: what about us?  The welfare of children is discovered and exhumed.  The children matter.  How they matter, indeed.  When cash is threatened with constriction, conscience comes to the fore.  Man! this is hypocrisy and immorality and intellectual dishonesty writ large, without compare.

The budgets and its tilts neither bothered nor gave pause.  But the striking teachers do.  Reputation and cash registers will suffer.  This is how consciences are cramped, develop a crook in the neck.  Conventions-Geneva, ILO, UN-have their uses, their times, and but only when self-interests are met, and the self-enriching flourishes.  Those guzzling and gorging at the oil trough lifting their heads and nuzzles, and holding aloft the children.  This is the epitome of absurdity, putridity, and obscenity.  Then again, it is democracy in action.  We all get to manifest what we stand for, what matters most to us.  Except some must not be heard.  Except that some must stand for nothing that causes some undermining of the bottom-line.