Our integrity

LIFE’S not about what is so now, but what we could create, what we could imagine and come up with in our minds and what we could dream of and aspire to and envision, and bring into reality.

Life’s about seeing a Marriott standing tall and elegant and graceful decorating the edge of the ancient Atlantic Ocean, palm trees and a sandy beach replacing the mud and mangroves of wild nature. Life’s about standing on the muddy edge of the roaring Berbice River in the crab-bush of d’Edward Village and seeing a modern high-tech bridge making it easy for us to travel from Corentyne to Parika. Life’s about re-imagining Providence and Diamond and Parfait Harmonie, seeing 21st Century residential communities where rows of cane-fields hugged the land for centuries.
Life’s about seeing an Olympic-style swimming pool on the East Coast of Demerara, a high-class athletics track on the West Coast of Demerara, a modern roadway along the Essequibo Coast. Life’s about seeing how we could turn empty space into aesthetic wonders of technology for a 21st Century Guyanese nation.
Whatever we may think of former President Bharrat Jagdeo, he’s got imagination. He sees what’s possible for the future. A quintessential politician who knows how to get what he wants, Jagdeo saw the possibility of Providence, imagined the Marriott opened for business, envisioned the Berbice Bridge a reality.
Jagdeo worked to move heaven and earth to bring these things into the Guyanese reality.
Imagining what’s possible calls for mastering the words that flow through the mind. We see, think and create the future with words, with language in the mind defining, designing, shaping the chaos of wild nature, the piece of wasteland on which the Marriott now stands, into the most valuable, aesthetic, elegant thing.
When President Donald Ramotar walked into the Office of the President after winning free and fair elections in 2011, he imagined a Guyanese society of good conscience, facing ourselves in the mirror, stirring up the courage and humanity in us to ensure that national social justice become a reality.
So he signed into being the Presidential Commission to probe the suspected political assassination of our most outstanding history scholar, Dr Walter Rodney. In this singular act of immense courage, good conscience and a profound sense of social justice, President Ramotar accomplished what no other Guyanese leader delivered to us: National social justice. President Ramotar re-defined who we are as a nation: No longer would we allow this international political stain to bedevil the Guyanese body politic.
After languishing for 34 years in a state of shameful head-hanging over how the Guyana Government under the People’s National Congress (PNC) treated our greatest international scholar, President Ramotar rose to the Presidential podium to give our nation back our humanity, causing the heart and soul of the Guyanese body politic to stir again with the confidence that we are a people of humane justice.
That’s an astonishing accomplishment.
If President Ramotar were to never accomplish anything else, he wrote his name at the top of Guyana’s history: He gave us back our humanity, lifting up the carpet of the past to reveal the darkness of our soul, and shedding light on our hidden sins to reveal how grotesque we had become after Independence. With the Walter Rodney story told, never again would we descend to those days, to a time when Guyana became notorious with the Jim Jones mass suicide tragedy, when a US fugitive could find refuge in Georgetown under a cult of thugs aligned to a repressive PNC State.
President Ramotar imagined what could be, what’s possible, for us as a people, and, without fanfare and chest-thumping and self-glory, quietly, humbly, even shyly, set about righting this terrible wrong that bedeviled our national conscience for so long, to the point where we wanted to forget, because we thought we could never find justice for Dr Rodney. Now we know what’s possible: we’re a noble-hearted people, our humanity fully alive, our belief in humane social justice real.
Fifty years into our coming into being as a nation, we’re still learning how to imagine ourselves, how to design the language in our national head and mind to shape our landscape into our potential, into the Guyana Dream.
This is where our writers and creative souls become important and foundational to our development.
We must cultivate dreamers, visionaries, writers of a new language, a deeper way of seeing, a keen awareness and profound consciousness, as V S Naipaul urges us, of where we are and where we want to be.
Once we design such a national way of thinking and talking, such a cultivated mindset, where our words create the future rather than cuss the present, we would witness a massive transformation of the Guyanese cultural evolution, social development and economic advance.
We’ve got a track record of this. Even as the Guyanese Government since free and fair elections worked to restore the broken walls and collapsed foundation of our society and State, so devastated after the PNC experimentation with the ideas of democracy and development, we’ve built, developed and advanced ourselves as a global 21st century nation.
So we know that if we imagine ourselves achieving our amazing potential in the future, we would get there. But it calls for one thing: integrity.
Integrity is simply this: the aligning of our actions with our words. If we think certain thoughts, if we talk about what we want, if we employ language to create the social space we want, to design our social environment, then we’ve got to align ourselves to our words. That’s what integrity is, us remaining true to our words, living for the purpose of our mindset.
In aligning ourselves to what we create and design in our national mind using the tool of words and language, we become a people of integrity.
Jagdeo and President Ramotar demonstrate integrity of character in imagining the Guyanese society, and determining, in the face of enormous opposition and myopic vision and an Oppositional language of tearing down and destructiveness, to overcome our limitations and to build our dreams into reality – in fact, to dream new dreams and envision new visions for us.
We’ve got to see these things, tell the true story of our nation, encourage and motivate and inspire Guyanese to think high and noble.
Low-mindedness has no place in our national conversation. We’ve got to employ this depth of seeing our national soul, to build our social space with conversations of objective critical thinking, seeing not what is so, but what’s possible: it’s in our possibility that we create the Guyanese nation, seeing the Amaila hydroelectric power project and a classy international airport and every Guyanese educated at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, as real, a done deal.
In the integrity of us coming into alignment with those words of vision in our national mindset, we walk forward confident, full of that Guyanese resolve to make it in the world.

 

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