I RARELY comment on other colleagues’ comments unless I feel I should – and in this case just to note two notes from the last two articles I read by my longtime colleague writer and fellow progressive thinker, Frederick Kissoon, in the Guyana Chronicle.
The first is Freddie’s profound revelation (in the column of June 23, 2023 aptly titled: My political life had been changed forever!) that after five-and-a-half decades of skirting everything from philosophy to anarchy to always bucking the political trend, he was driven by the type of one-time event that can erase the past and start a new path for, and to, a new future.

With no apologies, Freddie recalled the personal triumphs and manifestation of fierce independence by voting with his mind every five years, instead of according to traditional campaign platforms of the two major parties.
But his life was shaped greatly by his infatuation with the themes and substance of the books on Philosophy he got acquainted with at the Michael Forde Bookshop at Freedom House, headquarters of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) on Robb Street in Georgetown that remained permanently-etched in his fertile mind.

Clearly, the lifelong imprint of his early exposure to Marxist and Leninist philosophical works influenced his position that Humans should work and live happily on Planet Earth, but the lines never translated into the young revolutionary in him joining the PPP as a card-bearing member.
Freddie fought in the trenches for five decades, plus many years alongside others aiming at the same targets, but with different aims.

In the period leading up to, and after, the March 13, 2020 electoral debacle, his writings revealed certain levels of entertained discomfort generated by his fellow fighters for simply not blindly lobbing grenades in every direction, hoping at least one will hit something, somewhere.
After 2020, his detractors thought they’d sufficiently relegated him to their historical dustbin by treating him as an untouchable, with more than a ten-foot pole.

But no sooner than they’d slammed their doors shut and thought he was locked-out, a wider one opened to larger courts of local public opinion and the global public square.
Now Freddie shines even brighter, free to continue being himself, offering views we’ll agree with or won’t, but will all respect, coming from one who lets his thoughts flow unedited, whether from mind to pen and paper, or fingering his keyboard.

My second note here is of Freddie’s June 24, 2023 column entitled Our Former Foreign Minister Wrote Baloney addressing resent statements by ex-Guyana Foreign Affairs Minister and UN Ambassador Rudy Insanally.
The Ukraine war has seen the best of old minds adopt new positions (and vice versa) in these new times, when Climate Change and Regime Change increasingly collude and/or collide to offer many new lessons.

But given the long history and geopolitical sensitivities involved in understanding the roots that grew the unfruitful Russia-Ukraine ‘war’ or ‘special military operation’, I would not allow His Excellency’s position today to erase my impressions of his words and actions between 1993 and 1999, when I interviewed him several times as a senior international diplomat and a government minister.

On each occasion I found him to be in-step, lock-stock-and-barrel, with Guyana’s foreign policy objectives, as set-out by the PPP-led administrations he served at the United Nations (UN) and from the ministry at Takuba Lodge in Georgetown.
That said, I still defer to Freddie’s right to make his analysis and come to his conclusions, based on the words he quoted.

My bigger point, though, is that Freddie is yet-another very prime example of the extent to which right-and-left-thinking and middle-of-the-road Guyanese of all parties, races and creeds were put-off by the way the then government and ruling coalition handled their loss in March 2020, even accusing the Opposition of stealing its genuinely hard-fought election victory.
Many supporters decided not to dump their losing leaders, who had engaged legal and judicial gymnasts in defence of their unproven claims of having proof the election result was stolen.

After five months of monstrosities like voting spreadsheet figures being displayed on bedsheets and strangest-of-things happening at the Elections Commission during the endless counting, those who still hoped for some sort of plausible argument or justification from the reluctant losers were left in limbo — and the inevitable happened: Democracy was restored on August 2, 2020.
The same losers would lose again three years later – and again try to claim victory, this time unable to offer even a scintilla of evidence.

Rather than taking their blows in peace, they tore themselves into pieces, tearing-out even louder and wider against those former longstanding members and supporters (of all walks of life, race and creed) who, like Freddie, had, since 2020, decided to freely and fully exercise their democratic right to decide which party’s platform they would support in 2023.

Freddie’s account again confirms the undeniable reality that the Guyana electorate, like everywhere else, is more interested in tomorrow than yesterday, cares more about the future than the past; and most feel it a duty to join and help build A New One Guyana by supporting continuity instead of waiting for another national election to start-all-over – again…

And it’s these sorts of new developments in the new Guyana taking shape, that reaffirm the correctness of my decision early in life, like Freddie, to not only visit and purchase books and Amerindian trinkets at Michel Forde Bookshop every time I visited Guyana, but to also have worked for six years alongside Editor-in-Chief Janet Jagan at the New Guyana Company Limited, publishers of The Mirror newspaper.

Meanwhile, Freddie might not know, but Janet and Cheddi Jagan also both ordered and purchased the philosophy classics at Michael Forde — and as leaders in the business of spreading progressive knowledge, they would also have admired the lengths he went to, to get and read those books that helped him ultimately make his mind up, once and for all.
Big-up, Freddie!