It wasn’t going to end well
Kaieteur News – We always thought the words of Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, applies specifically to here and only here in this Guyana of ours.
That’s when he said in the proceedings of our national elections, overflowing with counting, recounting, and endless bargaining over both, that it wasn’t going to end well. To our consternation, Dr. Rowley past us. Much to the dismay of many Guyanese, and to much of the world at large, the Prime Minister’s words unfortunately took on a special meaning late last Wednesday afternoon before an unbelieving global audience, and in the capital of the United States of America, Washington, DC, of all places. It didn’t end well.
What started well didn’t end well for four people who have now died. They are dead to megalomaniac rhetoric, dead to spiteful speech, dead to divisive words so effortlessly robbed, but now so tragic. And the responsibility for those four deaths lies foursquare and fully at the feet of a sitting US president.
Playing with fire, and burning is inevitable. Remove the pin from live grenades, and it’s more than a ticking time bomb in the hand – it blows up in the face. And that’s what happened, after all the verbal manipulation and election hijacking of the president of the United States, last Wednesday.
What the US president did was not on the steps of some State House in some Deep South capital, but in Washington, DC, the national capital. The American leader whose official address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not small-time Governor Orville Faubus in Little Rock, AR in 1957 rallying the big ol ‘bigots and boys to take part in an almost full-scale riot, but the president of the United States, with sacred Constitutional obligations. Or as President-elect Joe Biden said of a people, time and place that now needs to return to the basics of honor and dignity. And the president of the incumbent of the United States should not be compared with the arch separatist George Wallace of Alabama, the heart of the old Confederacy, though there are substantial grounds for doing so, and do so forcefully and without fail. But as Martin Luther King once memorably described Governor George Wallace as the “most dangerous racist in America today,” the temptation and speculation is that such a comparison is most appropriate.
Although things hit a white-hot field in Arkansas and Alabama back in the ’50s and early’ 60s, no one died in those turbulent days of conflict and counting. But on a winter afternoon on Wednesday January 6 2021, four people died, and the cause of their violent deaths must be attributed to the president of the United States.
The president of the United States summoned supporters. The president of the United anarchists and demagogues rallied. And the president of the United States of America, through his supplementary words and his relentless posture, all but left them free to wreck whatever chaos suited his warped individual fancy. There is a lot of responsibility for that long simmering volcano that has become engulfed in the point of eruption that one must take ownership of, that it should be held accountable, and should be forced to pay for it before the bar of justice. We know that Joe Biden, the president-elect, is not.
We do not think such a fault should belong closely to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who tried late (yes), but he did. In any post-mortem, the finger of God is sure to draw the face of Senator Ted Cruz (R-FL), as an aide and abettor to his president’s delusions, all in the name of power, preservation of power, and extension of power.
We know the battle for power from a long experience, repeated every five years, here in Guyana. We’ve had our brushes with chaos and violence, as they are orchestrated and channeled into the mindless, unrestrained rage of the crowd, and it’s incredible unbound power. That is what we saw with tremor last Wednesday. That’s what the world also saw. That is not the practice of democracy, the one democracy for which the United States around the world is so ambitious, in which it seeks to enforce its once admired will and way. Well, that way went to the dogs before the world of watching.
He suffered the prestige of America; his reputation can no longer be spoken of in terms of the men before. And as the bells toll requiem for the four who fell, we do well to remember where and how it started, and the purpose of it all. And in terms of absolute and utmost responsibility, all we have to say is this: does it matter at all? Does it matter anymore?