Calling on the educated and enlightened of Guyana

Sep 26, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – In the best of circumstances, the educated and enlightened should be made of a singular material, possess the same foundations, and clean visions.  Regrettably, the best of circumstances and Guyana are so far apart as not to belong in the same sentence.  What should be and what is are strangers to each other.  Having earned and compiled distinctions in learning at a higher level and being beneficiaries of the good and troubling in life’s experiences, some rare wisdom, some extraordinary idea and relationship with truth and integrity, should be almost automatic.  And if there is difficulty, some recoiling, from embracing the distinguishing in their lives, their public essences and works, then even the minimum of the ordinary would be acceptable.  This is the call to the bright PhDs, JDs, DDs, and MDs, and others of what should be a gloriously patriotic and ethical pantheon: be about some light.  Please.

GHK Lall

Those who have a leader or group to extol, to defend, to caress and devote themselves blindly, keep on doing so.  It is a sacred right that inspires the sturdiest defense; such is endorsed here.  But there is another side to that loyalty, regardless of what it is based on, be it the oneness of race, the richness of reward, or the depth of reasoning.  There is that side, that internal construction and commitment to principle and honor, that sees the holes no matter how camouflaged, the weaknesses notwithstanding how they are nonchalantly ignored, always dismissed and made to disappear.  The gaps and failures that just cannot be looked away from, for the simple reason that there are so many of them.  There is the additional worrying consideration that they represent so many massive matters in a country precariously poised where it is.  The genuinely educated and the even more morally and honestly enlightened see and say: hey, wait a minute: this can’t be right, something is wrong here.  Over there also, and then, in more that is checked up and down the line.  This is where tone deaf partisanship begins to fray at the edges, where total submission to the cultish splits at the seams.  Educated men and women pause, honest human beings reel and steel themselves for the hard and bitter: of this and with this, I cannot be.  It shouldn’t matter which side is backed, which man is followed slavishly.  There comes a time when enlightenment demands the freeing of oneself.  Praise as much as pleases publicly; but also summon the courage and find the ethos somewhere to whisper powerfully: govern right, lead in a cleaner manner, be about what incorporates authentic change.  When mistakes and malfeasances multiply, decent men, educated and enlightened men and women with some residual call to honor in them stop and insist with a straight tongue: enough!  This cannot and must not go on.  If so, then count me out.  If not, what’s the point, what’s the sense, of all that education, that long and tough walk along life’s tricky corridors?

Nobody is being asked to switch sides.  Not in the least, for that would add perversity to poignancy.  But there must be that code of character that compels cutting loose when ongoing calumnies expand and explode like some out-of-control monstrosity.  A man is not a machine where a button is pressed, or a lever pulled, for the same results endlessly.  A man is a thinker, a woman is a helper who sees the whole territory, and there is Guyana before all and sundry.  In a one-dimensional society, luck and chance and commendable governance and leadership may help to skim the tide.  But not in a plural society, where even the best in leadership may not ever be good enough, cherished as acceptable.  Worse still, beyond the usual considerations, Guyana is a plural society that is ragingly polarized.  Of that may there be some honest agreement.  It is why there is this call for the learned of Guyana to bring to bear their talents and contexts, so that this whole country could be lifted.  May our PhDs and JDs and all the other Ds of the highest exposures and snowiest sheepskins be conscientious enough to recall two endeavors, two only, which are now shared.

First, there were those scientists of lofty pedigree who lent their names (often secretly) to the call of their oil masters.  Climate change is a hoax, based on bogus science.  Where doesn’t have landslides, try to cope with floods. Guyanese are struggling to survive with a heat blanket that is cripplingly oppressive.  Shroud is a more proper substitute for blanket, since there is the sense of death hovering.  But the PhDs and professors and prize winners said it’s all a voodoo operation.  Who had it right all along, and who sold their learning and bartered their reputations for what was wrong is no longer a question.  Second, there was tobacco.  Seductive pleasures gave way to sickness that killed lungs, then voice, then all the rest in strung out agony.  The knowledge was there; revelation came belatedly about what was done with it.  Who looked the other way and helped in the cover up.  Who allowed their credentials and character to be pawned for a pat from a hand with some coin inside.  The things that men do-whether DDs or EDs [or GEDs] don’t live after them, but with them.

The call is repeated to the galaxy of Guyana’s educated stars: shine with some light, sparking and undeniable truths.  There is a time for partisanship and cult leadership.  Then there is that time when a man must be true to himself.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)