Dear Editor,
The closing of the Stabroek News is a tremendous loss to Guyana’s fledging democratic claims.[1] It will diminish our democracy and subtract from an already compromised pernicious winner-take-all system at a time when truth telling and integrity have been devalued, and uncouth intellectually barren discourse is cheered by many whom are degreed but uneducated. Witness the stench that was an excuse for Parliamentary debate. The cultural, social, political and intellectual life of Guyana has suffered another blow to the stomach.
Guyana owes a great deal of respect to the de Caries family: David, Doreen, Isabelle and Brendan, and the other courageous souls who gave Guyana an institution of integrity and truth. I want to personally thank Stabroek News for having the courage to print my seven letters of the African Renaissance in 2009, a time, similar to now, when the perception of racial exclusion is the predominant currency in the country. Courage is the operative world. Stabroek News had this rare courage. It is a cherished value gone missing in our society. We are living Mahatma Gandhi’s worst nightmare: “Politics without principle. Commerce without morality. Wealth without work. Education without character. Science without humanity. Pleasure without conscience. Worship without sacrifice”.
We are creating a society without a soul. Many start the day with the prayer “God give me health and strength, the rest I will steal”. We are living in a society of the willfully ignorant, not recognizing that karma has its own generational dispositions. The loss of the Stabroek News should force us to reflect on the overarching crisis facing our country. It should force us to reflect on what type of country we will leave our children and grandchildren with as they fight against seen and unseen principalities for their inherited rights. Democracies rarely die overnight but rather slowly and legally when important institutions are starved to death either by technology or other means. With the loss of Stabroek News we are witnessing the gradual breakdown of basic democratic norms through the weakening of “voices” of integrity by any means necessary.
As I reflect on the indifference to the 400 anniversary of Africans arriving in Guyana, we are in the state of creating a nation where indifference is the preferred business model. Where apathetic cowards sell their souls for a few pieces of silver. Where a Dancehall Monarch concert can be held at the sacred space of the 1823 monument – something that would not have occurred had the monument been Lord Shiva. A concert sponsored by the Guyana state.
We are not the “wretched of the earth” where only money matters, void of the consciousness of unity of all people whose cultures are respected and embraced with the absence of implicit bias and malice. Our graceless society where pomp and ceremony, power and arrogance triumph over decency and inclusion reigns, it is time for the movement of real unification of what it means to be Guyanese in our ‘One Guyana’. Horace Greeley was correct when he reminded us that “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character”.
Stabroek News, thank you for your character. You have served us well. It is only fitting that I thank you with Martin Carter’s poem:
This is the dark time, my love.
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky.
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.
This is the dark time, my love.
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.
Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
I do hope the incredible work of the de Caires Family and Moray House Trust is not forgotten and lost. In gratitude. Stay well.