Dear Editor,
What I noticed about Guyanese is some are professional “awfulisers” and naysayers who are unable to give government credit for anything. This distorts their viewpoints and make them seem to be perpetual anti-government gripers. Normal people tend to have balance – you give credit where credit is due, and give critiques where critiques are due. Everything cannot be bad and awful. On the other hand, everything is not always fine and dandy. Fairness determines that we cautiously look at the pros and cons of things – the big, full picture – then make our decision where we stand. This is good advice as we vote on September 1 to determine which party has the history, record, and experience of performance and abundant evidence of results.
Beware of the political awfulisers! Awfulising is a cognitive distortion and irrational thought pattern where a person exaggerates the negative aspects of a situation, believing it to be “awful” or “horrific” when it is merely bad in a minor way or unfortunate. Awfulisers catastrophise a situation, imagining the worst possible outcomes without any real evidence, according to psychologist Albert Ellis.
There are a lot of irritants we face living in Guyana. People whine and complain all the time. Most people are not rational nor critical thinkers. People mostly operate on an emotional level. They easily take an anti-position against governments. Everything is bad and everything is awful, they say. That usually is not true. A friend called and asked me why is President Ali announcing so many medical training programmes in regions outside of Georgetown? I asked him is that a complaint or a compliment. I asked him, why do Berbice people, Essequibo people or Hinterland people not deserving of equal treatment, equal access, equal opportunity, and equity as Georgetown people?
Some parties would make you think nothing has improved in Guyana and that we are not better off now than five years ago. Never mind we have spent a trillion plus dollars, and there are mountains of evidence of the most accomplishments under this government. We have never had as much development as under the Ali Administration. When you say that, people retort, “they have oil money” as if that diminishes all the progress. This government has accomplished the most of any administration in our history. Yet, some parties campaign that we must vote them out of office. According to these parties, everything is bad and awful, and their party is the saviour. Never mind these parties have histories of staying in power by perpetual rigging, or supporting rigging when they were in the PNC. The new parties have no history or record of progress as they were just born.
So these parties want us to ignore the thousands of roads, the many bridges, thousands of house lots given, billions of cash grants given, billions of student grants given, thousands of scholarships given through GOAL and UG, forgiveness of billions in student debts, an abundance of new schools built, several new hospitals and clinics built, thousands of new acreages under cultivation, steady increases in salaries and pensions, etc. – and they want us to believe the government has done badly or done nothing for us! But balanced, fair-minded people will conclude that given all the factors, the progress under President Ali has been unparallelled. Nobody is saying everything is fine and dandy, but based on their record and all available evidence, Guyana is rising, and our best years are ahead of us!