The perpetual price of hate
Kaieteur News – Eight are confirmed shot and killed in Atlanta, with six identified as Asians. The area police were properly protected: it is too early to link to a likely anti-Asian bias made more apparent by the speculated and finished origin of the rampaging COVID-19 virus. The first thought, given the majority of the victims who were murdered, was that it can be nothing other than that inclination, which has been simmering and is now intensifying in places as far apart as California and New York . That’s what exploded into harrowing violence Tuesday night in Georgia.
It’s an age-old story of prejudice without knowing any boundaries, and hatred prevalent over every deterrent city. Pandemic attacks can be said to be the root of the violence events, with those eight deaths being the latest.
When some poisonous varieties are sown, then it is the hurricane that is harvested: hail of bullets; a community forced behind defensive barricades; and the worry (and shame) that events would inevitably have led to something of this magnitude. When such embers are stunned, the bigots respond with zest; when the flame flashes, the racers run riot. Some do so with words, others do so with bullets in their eyes, in their hearts, and in their pointed and fired guns. We have done so here in a reckless way, but have been fortunate to avoid the connection of circumstances that flared, but without overflowing into Atlanta chaos on Tuesday.
At most levels in our society and in almost every social cell, we have the emotional turmoil released by the harsh political posture of our leaders and their extreme followers. It is said, rather unwisely, that this happens mainly during election times here. That political self-serving assertion, which is also a racial comfort, has some fractional accuracy. But while it is true that political and racial prejudices reach more during election seasons, it is a more persistent reality that those prejudices and the passions they provoke are only expressed more publicly and expose them more individually.
It is part of the price of Guyanese prejudices that are more than seasonal, they are annual in the fullness of its day length. What we read about in our newspapers, and looking at our TVs, has become so close to a cat whispering to happen here. We’ve had Lusignan and Rose Hall; we’ve had Linden and Bartica. Like Atlanta, it serves our purposes well when the executioner is a hateful Lone Ranger, or a downed criminal group, or an orchestral mercenary band of phantoms. It gives our politicians who are stealthy start-ups, our loyal responding parties, and the rest of our distressed citizens unknowingly the kind of ground that provides protective cover. The veil of being ignorant and uninterested, of being undisclosed, of being outside the community and national box that holds us and our sick prejudices.
When we stand smug and detached, we are no less innocent. When we refuse to either be troubled or involved, then we have contributed as savagely as any racist perpetrator of heinous acts. We used to speak a hundred words a minute about truth and reconciliation a while back. It’s interesting and revealing as to where we are now on that score. This is also part of the price we pay for our prejudices. Deny as we wish, this is where we are, and why we get what we get in this country with racial truths. It’s nowhere, and with that, we’re fine.