Books are a Key to Enlightenment

A SENIOR politician in the current opposition on a television programme with the very vocal and, at times, strange Christopher Ram on Channel 28 (when Tony Vieira owned that station before 1992) once gleefully boasted that 85 percent of his constituency is illiterate. I could not fathom why that was said with an almost reassuring and confident poise. Time and previous experience resonated why to that politician it was indeed an asset to his politics though, it was a tremendous limitation to his constituency. Because, if a constituency relies on its political and religious leaders alone for guidance then for a contrived cause based on part fact, but two thirds fiction. They can end up as Hitler’s’ Waffen SS with the most casualties of any military group of the German forces in WW2 and eventually with a Fuhrer decree to fight to the last man, beyond the last bullet, save that back then, their ideological but educated leaders, in the end, disobeyed their drug addict Fuhrer, saving fanatically driven lives.

Many years ago, Senior Journalist, Claudette Earle gave me a UNESCO Information Sources magazine No. 14, April 1990 with an Editorial by the writer Jorge Semprun Maura, Spanish Minister of Culture. I can’t present the entire editorial but I can quote morsels of it: “Books are the best form of sustenance that I have found on this journey through life, and as such they have nurtured, constrained, accompanied, irritated, educated, amused, and deluded me in whatever I have seen or done. I therefore find it difficult to consider them separately from the events of a lifetime, or to be objective about their role in anyone else’s life, let alone my own, because they are part and parcel of it, like my own skin.”

We witness politicians in parliament who cannot spell, replace basic principles with brute logic, political women who displayed deceitful hysteria and postulated unjust victimisation. This far-reaching comic tragedy conducted in the Parliament of Guyana recently, alone, implies the urgency to return literature to primary school to defy such mature backwardness. I was invited by an organisation I am with to give a lecture on social features I have written about. In trying to get the children to respond, I invited a few to come forward to test their social awareness. In the discourse, I enquired of one 13 year old what type of books she read. She honestly replied that she doesn’t read, because reading makes her want to sleep.

My thoughts raced to a modern prophecy that alerted me some two decades ago. It was an interview of the finance guru Schwab when he referred to the future as one where “the defining line shall not be between the haves and have not, but between those who know and those who don’t know”. Information on practical life skill systems in our knowledge-driven world will determine a wider more independent aptitude for decision making toward personal and collective survival. Problems that will affect us are no longer related only to our leaders and administrators, though they bear guilt. But further, the fact highlighted by Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1987 has not changed, when he said “There are 400 multimillionaires with more wealth than half the world’s population. It’s an invitation to conflict.” That conflict will in many cases be waged against copy cat politicians of the ‘Third World’ as we have witnessed in Guyana who were willing to betray the interests of the nation to create their own club of local multimillionaires and creeping sycophants, owning wealth impossible to be generated from within the economic capacity of the humanity within the borders of Guyana, while showing no external income generation history.

But the prostrate invitation to investors to do as they wish once the bed and room are paid for. This has included politicians as well as Trade Union heads. The only equalising skill to halt the inspired domino crab barrel effect, evident, is that of the knowledge base, to engage the onion skin layers and shades of understanding required to comprehend the consequences of the undercurrents that lie beneath the apparent smooth waters of deceptions that we consider our normalcy, and which the unknowing population is manipulated at times against their own awakening.

The other relevant quote from the UNESCO Sources publication has a definite relationship to the callous nature of local politics, you be the Judge: “On the contrary, only through books can the material needs of humans be met, because with the help of books they will reason lucidly and make clear-sighted choices. Furthermore, and here I quote Mallarme, a poet not given to triteness: everything in the world exists to be turned, ultimately, into a book. The experience of books is what books have harvested from experience: the voice of everyone, speaking to all of us.”

President Granger has defined the tragedy of a partly educated nation, so did Minister Rupert Roopnaraine before he became ill. How has this happened to one of the most literate of Caribbean Nations? The answer exists partly in the politics of the past 20 years which space constraints prohibit, a narrative off.

What is evident is that no local Government as was done with the last Government should have implemented a system that passes children from class to class regardless of examination results, removing the consequence of failure, where a 13 year old must endeavour to liberate him/her self from remaining in a class of 11 year olds, inspiring the transfer to Industrial and Home economic arts or by efforts to pass as was the norm of my school life, where such fears made children pay attention and visit the teacher during recreation for much-needed subject clarifications. The fact is not negotiable if you can’t read and understand books, and not Google extracts alone, then you will not have the armour to endure the challenges that careers present in our knowledge-based 21st Century world.