WE live like in no other age; in a time that requires an understanding of the flow of ideas, good, bad and fraudulent that will outpour from politics. Religion and social media reaching to grip and shape our consciousness, the comfort zones of religion, our indifference to exploring, nor will superficial political banter based on untested hearsay protect or empower us.

We have to accept the social evolution before us, because our physical human world is changing and has changed, to evolve and stay relevant we too have got to understand and clarify the logic of opinions thrown before us, by foraging for the truth that will explain the intentions behind so much that will seek to confuse and exploit us. We must compare the old and new textbooks. I refer to our books of religion and science and the metaphors of the humanities to reach for help, for to lose one’s consciousness is tantamount to losing our souls.
I want to engage you, if you’re reading this article, in a discourse of the age of belief and that of comparison with the contemporary. The Bible is a fantastic record of history and human nature if you read it and not allow it to be only read and interpreted to you, whether you are an atheist or sceptic, the God or Intelligence that inspired and guided the pool of diverse knowledge, both metaphoric, historical and geographic, gathered to compose the scriptures was profound and consistent.

The Book of Enoch the prophet was not included in the scriptures but it exists and is available, and is relevant because of Enoch’s narrative of the hyper-sapiential beings called the Watchers, whose nature permitted them to mate with human women, but were angelic in their abilities. Their leader Azazel and his kindred Watchers are accused of opening the faculties of homo-sapiens to an age of lawlessness, sexual perversion, genetic aberrations and magical aspirations, corrupting our species. Enoch describes the Biblical flood and the fall of the Watchers, leaving us with a metaphoric value template that divides social decline and its only cure, against the struggle for social development in our mundane world.

Society or some societies understand the guidelines to upkeep to halt its decay, they hold this knowledge closely, and implement measures to enforce the balance, a simple reference is that a managerial promotion recipient must be married, the balance of man and wife, wife and husband must exist. A widower could become a world leader, but not an unmarried mature man, and not a person of questionable gender. Tolerance exists but there are cut-off points.

We witness these manifestations, hardly pondering where the references came from. In Guyana we have experienced lawlessness and the criminalisation of our society, the recruitment of the lazy into the service of perversions. Many have become lassitude in spirit, in the failure of decades of administrative measures to be proactive, rather than eventually crawl to the table of initiatives, with ad hoc measures, while the vacuum is filled with all that constitutes the local term ‘Runnings’. The opportunistic grabble by deceptive persons for the seat at the head of the table, on the Magic Carpet of ‘Talking the talk’ has led to the rise of characters at the helm of important social and political institutions and even with known failures they persist on the pretext that enough of the masses have forgotten or are clueless enough to not know the mechanisms for their own development to articulate it successfully, so though flawed, they retain possessions of entities that they can no longer energise and have long betrayed for their own survival.

Take the Trade Unions as a workable case study of the misuse of authority while cultivating misguiding rhetoric where useful honesty would have served workers interests better, a complete reversal of the historical foundations of Trade Unionism. Follow, and then ask working-class buddies for verification of the following. Ask the Seamen in the case with the Norwegians which Union Head took a car and betrayed them? Then ask the brothers who worked at Omai what other union representative took a Motorcar again and bartered their interests.

I was in the vicinity of the PSU during the Customs protest in the 1990’s when another union head stabbed those workers in the back, then asked for protection from Leon Fraser and the ‘Death Squad’ to protect him from irate union members, a stab in the back that he tried to justify when I accosted him later in Church Street where I resided at the time, when he visited a colleague who lived in the back house.

He was unapologetic and comfortable with his treachery, and in 2017 still mouths the empty self-serving rhetoric. But the worse betrayal of ‘believing folk’ comes from the union of the Sugar Workers, a union that was aware since the 90s, with the public fully realising long before April 2015 that Sugar was produced at US$800 per ton and was selling for $300.00 per ton. An industry whose workers because of their limitations and false assurances given, needed immediate educating, training and divesting of human resources into viable projects, that union was aware that the EU sub venture was not used in the interest of its workers development by the former government it had pledged allegiance to, yet they maintained a political stance, rather than face the inevitable economic reality, that has now come to full maturity, and they still persist in the misleading gaff of Sugar-worker victimhood.

The variables of cultural, religious, historical and political experience exist, but the element of misguidance and purposely fashioned misrepresentations of these areas and the beating down of the inferior complexes of groups into hatreds for other groups for political manipulation has from the infancy of this nation have brought us to where we are. The State policy of Cohesion is bold, but it requires brave confrontal consultations, we must discuss taboo areas of the ‘Guyanese being’ along with the differences that are there and are in some cases skilfully conceived mirages that must be diminished, forced changes in Guyana from the world around us, demand that we know and understand better. Next week, with the grace of providence, I will attempt a reference to the bold task of Social Cohesion.