Priority is to save lives

Dear Editor,

The calendar says January 10, 2022. The early morning sun in Prashad Nagar pierced through my window. I couldn’t tell where else the sun was shining. There was just this feeling of doubt overwhelming me – alone. But then, as if empathetically, the light faded into a contemplative darkness – still alone.

With whom, I reflected, could I share this sense of loneliness, separateness, if not abandonment, at 09:00 hrs. this Monday morning? On further thought it must be just self-indulgence, with no one to call and share this moment of contemplation.

The fact is that I feel overcome by the prevaricatory environment in which our ‘New Year’ has entered. For there is nothing ‘New’, and certainly nothing to be ‘happy’ about. It is all a chimera – worldwide, with deaths surging in this global pandemic that speaks in every conceivable language so that all can understand; and into which we may all succumb.

So at the beginning of 2022 in Guyana, I could only wonder at the futility of our profound self-defamation ignoring the prospect of almost total depletion – of material sustenance; not to mention the boastful declaration of abandonment of our spirituality.

We do not seem to be warned by the progressive deterioration in nearby, and far-flung ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries (so called) compared to whom we are – just ‘villagers’ in the most fundamental sense. We simply think, behave ‘small’, as we paltrify one another with our petty provocations, pushing one another downwards into the depths of unforgivable division, boasting of ‘ethnic’ triumph over what indeed is but a pyrrhic victory, over our humanity.

Should we not ask ourselves the silly question of how and who will win? Or are our progeny already debating this answer – this masquerade? For in another schizophrenic breadth, we speak of ‘teamspirit’, a conjuration in the midst of ‘ethnicity’, however defined in ‘one’ nation of six ‘peoples’ (or are we just ‘races’?)

So we must ponder on the profound conundrum of ‘unity’ in ‘ethnicity’ – in a village of flooded waters. How, and for how long, will we stay afloat, for we are not all swimmers – a capacity so much needed in the admixture of climate change.

But most immediately in 2022 the priority is to save lives – of every ‘ethnicity’. It is not enough to contain the infections. Rather, the situation presents a profound opportunity for us to be inclusive, embracive, to ‘unify’ in constructing a proactive strategy for containing the pandemic that threatens all ‘ethnic humanities’.

This should be our prayer.

Yours faithfully,

E.B. John