Why should we all be condemned to a guarantee of continued losing in the future?

Dear Editor,

It is all so familiar. One party wins and is overjoyed. The other loses and is in a state of despair. Both have repeated respective experiences – of celebration and mourning – over the past fifty years.

Neither of them, however, has ever bothered about the perpetual gloom through which each in turn has led the nation. Neither of them has ever shown remorse for repeating the mistakes of the past, simply because they do not acknowledge their chronic indisposition.

Voters are beguiled by the votees who rise to power then ignore, and even abuse the former.

As they have talked to their supporters during their campaigns, but empowered they persist in talking down to citizens who are hopeful of old promises to be fulfilled.

In the process citizens are first of all in a state of wonder, then of questioning, waiting, increasingly anxious about manifestoed deliverables.

Those of us, insecure in Berbice chairs, are resigned to the familiar unhealthy experience of discrimination, divisiveness, uselessness, of defensive and even abusive rejoinders, the pattern of misbehaviours which set such glaringly bad examples for the young in particular to emulate.

Sitting in our Berbice chairs, it is difficult not to reach back to a historical environment of meanness – the gross indulgence in self, the determination not to agree, not to forge partnership, not to play as a team, while derisibly expecting such attributes of their public servants.

Observers must wonder how such profound dismemberment could obtain in a village of 700,000 people. How, they would ask, is it possible that in such a small village there could be so much differentiation – no common language of body and spirit to embrace – albeit in the face of so many churches, temples and mosques. Who was it that said that if we do not learn from our past mistakes we are condemned to repeat them? This is exactly what the nation fears; and regardless of differences would offer prayers for rehabilitation.

For the election results speak to a hollow victory for one party, while the whole of a nation (of 700,000 villagers) loses.

Why should we all be condemned to a guarantee of continued losing in the future? Is this some peculiar virus?

Yours faithfully,

E.B. John