THE CULTURE OF NATIONS

And our naive reluctance to educate our people outside of the box

THE Exxon debate reveals a peculiar conditioning that has boxed us into a mental comfort zone that, now understood, should challenge our educators to expand our worldview. Our worldview in many ways is still simplistic; we feel that the countries we admire were always hospitable and progressive in thinking; that their well-managed cities always existed; that their economies were blessed by God and are not a result of bullying, exploitation, wars, false doctrines and murder.

We long for the good old days, with no knowledge of what was common 70 years ago; that the good old days in Guyana were accompanied by superstition, kero and gas lamps; dirt roads, a madhouse, a leprosy asylum, a tuberculosis facility; male and female juvenile delinquent schools, inadequate and repressive housing and scarce employment; a social caste system, low wages, self-contempt etc. Much of these ailments of the consciousness we have not corrected completely.

One of the main attitudes that are counterproductive rest with our politics, but I have hope in the future. It was my youngest that brought me to the quote of Dr. Gordon K. Lewis who I honestly never heard of before, that defined our region: “The amazing fury of the West Indian political partisan, the conviction that politics will cure all”. This was said in the 1960s and in many cases that cultural thinking still stops there.

One of the fetters that the current president of Guyana is trying to break, is the culture of ‘micromanagement’. That element requires the president to think, manage, do the homework, scold and implement policies for the people he appoints. President Burnham did it, Hoyte tried to break from it, Cheddi had to do it and failed, Jagdeo loved it and created the worst that micromanagement could develop into. Ramotar didn’t seem to know quite what to do.

David Granger designates and expects application and responsibility. To achieve this, with some he needs a firing squad, with others he may just need scrutinised reports. Read the letter columns, we have evolved specific critics who offer few suggestions, thus, there are few doers. The bottom line is, to achieve this requires a bold educational and cultural system, and the enforcement of our Laws, which this system is moving toward.

The recent EXXON preamble is a great example of what is not known in the minds of most of the population, leaving citizens in a quandary about assessing information as to whether in the context of reliable or as sensationalised misguided propaganda, with the confined view that all social ailments are the President’s fault. It is funny but tragic, but it revolves around comatose failures of the system.

For example, I know of the work of a former People’s Militia Lieutenant, Herbert Edwards who has laboured for years on an easy to read book that started as an illustrated novel on the ‘The Guyana –Venezuela Border Controversy’. Then-President Jagdeo had okayed it, but then-Minister of Education Henry Jeffrey refused to publish it. However this book is very likely to be published in the near future.

Though this border issue has haunted our economic growth from Independence to the present, while Venezuela taught their schools the theory of a false border claim, and included Essequibo on their maps, we did nothing (except a booklet in 1982 illustrated by Tyrone Doris and written by Allan Fenty) to sensitise our population to the geopolitical world our young nation had entered into.

With the support of UNICEF in 1997 I created the first full length 43-page graphic-comic book on HIV-AIDS possibly in the Caribbean: ‘Arnold’s Journey’ Edited by Dr Sarah Gordon’s medical team of authorities in the field. When printed, UNICEF handed the books over to the Ministry of Education. Two years later, a friend came to my home with four of the books. I questioned him, he said that he had gone to the Ministry and while placed on a seat to wait, he saw someone he knew. They started to chat, strolled into a room and there were several packages of the books among other stuff. He picked up a handful and his friend remarked “Them comic books about AIDS deh here a long time” and that was it.

Marijuana and cocaine and now dangerous pills, masquerading as ‘Fun Stuff’ have invaded Guyana for the past 30 years.Our streets are filled with addicts and they contribute to a solid percentage of murders. Mind-altering substances that have evolved obviously mentally disabled people at different levels, yet there are no proactive educational directives toward a breakdown of information to our young and vulnerable.

It’s a phenomenon of creative inactivity enveloped in the familiar box of accustomed structures. How did this happen? Because, there is enough evidence that there were able thinkers once, though there was always a clash between the haughty colonial spectre and the anxious revolutionary neophyte.

The EXXON debate is a grand case study of a merger of information, disinformation and hidden agendas. The poster ridiculous, compared to this or that other situation, but in the whole, before an audience denied the information to construct a valid assessment from the perspective of the real world of the Culture of Nations.

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