EMOTIONAL PAIN AND POLITICAL CHOICES
There are many Guyanese at home and abroad who are suffering emotionally. They are out there and their pain is visible. It is expressed each day by their attitude.
They are suffering not because of some death in their family or some other personal problem or tragedy. They are in pain; they are traumatized; they are troubled; they are grumpy.
Some of them are in Guyana and some of them live outside of Guyana.
They are frustrated because the PPP is in power and they cannot come to grips with this fact. They want desperately to see the back of the PPP.
Unable to achieve this goal, they inflict pain on themselves by drowning themselves in mental turmoil.
At times, their frustration boils over and they blame the leaders of the opposition for being ineffective. They take out their anger and frustration on the very persons they would like to see replace the PPP.
These persons are in angst over the fact that the PPP continues to win election after election. They are disturbed by the PPP’s continuing successes in government. The success of PPP governments is driving some people staring mad. They cannot take it anymore.
These persons who are suffering daily can see no good in anything that the present governing party does. Even the best of intentions are ridiculed and scorned.
Well-minded citizens have to be patient with these individuals. They have to understand that they are dealing with persons who prefer to see any other party rule over Guyana, even if it is a ruined Guyana, rather than a government which has rebuilt this country after it experienced a political and economic hurricane that destroyed public institutions, morals and values.
Greater empathy has to be shown to those who suffer each day when they see signs of progress and when they read about plans to make the country better. Not all of those suffering are in Guyana. Some of them are overseas, desperately trying to scrape a living, wanting to come back to sunny Guyana, but are too embarrassed to face the truth, too ashamed to confront the progress that they will see.
They sit in front of their computer screens in the cold, freezing winter and ingest their daily dose of bile and rancour. This is their recourse that makes them believe they are contributing to some noble struggle, when it fact they cannot deal with their own struggles.
Guyanese like to speak about the need to come together. But there are far too many individuals who are not interested in coming together to build Guyana. They are interested in one thing and one thing only, and that is to see the demise of the PPP administration.
At every step of the way the PPP has, however, defied their wishes. The PPP has won every free and fair election held in this country since 1953.
The PPP has never lost an election, and despite the failure to secure a parliamentary majority last November, it still got the most votes and therefore the right to the presidency.
And so when the rules by which all sides agree to abide cannot deliver the expulsion from power of the PPP, there is a clamouring for constitutional reform.
When this reform comes and still the PPP retains power, there are more calls for reforms of the reform.
At present, the call is for a system that would allow for the parties to coalesce after the elections, so as to secure control of the government.
At present, the party with the highest votes earns the right to form the government. Ironically, this system was designed so as to ensure the possibility of a minority party being able to win the presidency. It was put in place to offer the possibility of denying the PPP the right to form the government. But instead it has delivered victory after victory for the PPP since the return to free and fair elections in 1992.
And with each victory the frustration wells up. We can speak about putting Guyana first, and most Guyanese do, but there are many who want to put some party other than the PPP first. And this is the tragedy of this forty-two year-old republic.
There are far too many persons who, instead of wanting the best for Guyana, want only to see the backs of the ruling party, and therefore are putting partisan interests in front of the country.
Those persons are fortunately in the minority, and many of them perhaps will never come back to Guyana, since they will find it difficult to face the reality of what is taking place in the country.
Guyana can move much quicker if it ignores the naysayers and deals with the many problems that it has to deal with.
But when a poor country is so swamped by the frustrations of those who are keener on voting out the PPP than with developing the country, when everything that the government does becomes an opportunity for criticism and ridicule, you can conclude that the progress of Guyana will always be much slower than it ought to be.
