WHEN we Guyanese wake up in the morning to face our day, we look forward to positive, good things happening for us. No one anticipates a bad day. We aspire to enjoy the peaceful blessedness that is our Guyana, our sunny tropical air, our lush landscape of trees and rivers and blue sky.

Yet, in encountering the national media, we see gore, crime, dissent and quarrels and our newspapers’ front pages failing to inspire us, to lift our spirits, to motivate us.
TV news programmes also flow into our living rooms full of stressful content. Although our new exciting radio personalities, like Henry Singh, make a valiant effort to bring us inspiring, uplifting content, the negatives overwhelm us.
And on Social Media, we hardly see the popular posters sharing content that is thoughtful, encouraging and serene.
In this elections season, our Social Media landscape overflows with political rants, nasty cussouts, and people trembling with discontent and malcontent venting their quest for revenge and vengeance on anyone who dares cross their paths.
The Guyanese society lacks thought leaders who shape and design the national conversation. Despite the proliferation of engaging, interesting and brilliant human interest content in every village and town and corner of Georgetown, our Reporters and Journalists do not tell us the stories of the Guyanese people.
President Donald Ramotar and Government Ministers, including Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh and Home Affairs Minister Mr Clement Rohee, could talk about our positives till they are blue in the face. We ignore much of it, and pick the one tiny sound bite that we could use to tear the society apart, and use that ad infinitum.
We see very few uplifting content turned into engaging stories, involving how development benefits Guyanese citizens. We refuse to tell the true story of the 21st century Guyanese nation, the story of our people rising in leaps and bounds, developing and advancing.
Thus, we demoralise our people, insisting on spewing across the national airwaves and social spaces words that convey stress and brokenness, rather than healing and bringing together.
It’s time to transform how we design the Guyanese social platform, how we tell the stories of our people, how we engage each other. We must use the reach and power of our TV stations, radios programmes, newspapers and magazines to build a natural Guyanese social landscape where we all feel great about waking up in this beautiful homeland.
The single theme that drives the negatives is this: complaints against Government. Complainers complain that leaders in Government are bad, evil and mean. How realistic is such nonsense?
Government leaders are human beings, just like anyone of us. For critics to oppose Government for the sake of opposing is for us to descend to gutter language, as we see with the Opposition.
Yet, even with the discontents in the Opposition, we must understand that they are angry, hurt and seek political power.
These are people who think they can make this country better, but only with political power. We must understand such a mentality, and seek to design a national conversation that makes space for such views, albeit within a context that does not demoralise the Guyanese nation.
The story of the tragic demise of Courtney Crum-Ewing shows how irrational and unthinking some among us behave. Immediately, without an investigation, Opposition leaders and a few vocal social media souls started peddling accusations against Government, because Crum-Ewing was protesting against the State.
Prime Ministerial candidate for the Opposition, Moses Nagamootoo, explained this as a natural reaction of lawyers, who placed the protester’s killing within the context of his political actions, and thus drew a probable conclusion.
This type of analysis driving public behaviour lacks a crucial foundation: consideration for the state of mind of the Guyanese nation.
When the private media picked up a side comment of former President, Bharrat Jagdeo, at Babu John last week, and reported that Jagdeo “cussed out” the Opposition, those editors lacked consideration for the state of the Guyanese psyche, seeming oblivious to the fact that the media play the most important role in designing the social space of the Guyanese homeland. Jagdeo made a comment in passing in his speech, and gleeful media discontents grabbed it with juvenile excitement, shouting it all over the nation, playing down the fact that the former President was in fact extolling the values of President Ramotar as a “democratic” leader of our nation.
How would these editors feel if someone came into their own space and take a little insignificant comment and plaster posters of negatives all over their walls?
Then we saw the media this week twist and deform a comment from Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee, claiming the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP) is a “coolie party”. Without regard to the flames such media reports could instigate, given how these critics claim that racism exists in Guyana, these media practitioners proceed to plant in the national consciousness the idea of racism, ethnic strife and tribal conflict. Are these people exercising their minds, or operating on emotional automata?
We must be conscious what we put on the walls of the mind of Guyanese people. We’re a small, close-knit society. We must care for each other, and take care that we don’t damage our national psyche.
Of course, the State media cannot escape this necessity to design the national conversation. In fact, the ultimate responsibility lies with the State media to set the tone for the national conversation, to lift the spirits of our people in the face of irrational prejudice and crass bias in the private media.
We want to see stories of our people, how development over the past decades absolutely transformed the lives of Guyanese, in Bartica, Moruca, Lethem, Crabwood Creek, Anna Regina, Linden and Diamond. We want to see TV documentaries and books and newspaper features of young families owning their own homes and driving new cars and sending their kids to elite private schools. We want to see the human development that flows from our nine years of continuous GDP growth.
The last week saw our Guyanese nation reel under a nexus of stories: when we put these three stories together, playing in the background of the national mind, we see how irresponsible is our media landscape to shape our social space for a peaceful, progressive people to live together, knitted in our common Guyanese identity.
Let’s look at these three stories, and learn our lesson: the private media regurgitated the suggestion that Crum-Ewing may have been a victim because of his protest against Government; the private media kicked into high gear Jagdeo’s Babu John comment, calling it a “cuss out”; and the private media twisted and deformed Rohee’s comment about the membership of the PPP as a “coolie” party. Put these three stories together in the mind of the Guyanese people, especially people uninformed of the real contexts of each, and we see the damning effect and demoralising impact. What takes shape is a lie that seems as truth, because the three stories seem unrelated. Yet, those who reported them link these stories to the theme that Government is racist, thus creating a national perspective that Guyana is under the spell of some nasty ethnic paranoia.
Such is the wickedness that subjects our people’s psyche to a demoralising crassness, stifling the minds of citizens of this beautiful landscape carved out of South America, where we could enjoy a paradisiac lifestyle. Instead, our society descends into a rhetoric hellhole.
It’s time for us to transform how we design the national conversation, to ditch the national demoralising that plays out every day, reducing us to mental and emotional trauma. It’s time we uplift the spirt of the Guyanese people, encouraging and motivating and inspiring ourselves.

Let’s look at these three stories, and learn our lesson: the private media regurgitated the suggestion that Crum-Ewing may have been a victim because of his protest against Government; the private media kicked into high gear Jagdeo’s Babu John comment, calling it a “cuss out”; and the private media twisted and deformed Rohee’s comment about the membership of the PPP as a “coolie” party. Put these three stories together in the mind of the Guyanese people, especially people uninformed of the real contexts, and we see the damning effect and demoralising impact. What takes shape is a lie that seems as truth, because the three stories seem unrelated. Yet, those who reported them link these stories to the theme that Government is racist, thus creating a national perspective that Guyana is under the spell of some nasty ethnic paranoia.

by Shaun Michael Samaroo