Guyana Could Do With A Few More Peter Ramsaroops

When we use the phrase “Telling it from the mountain” to describe the outpourings of others or even ourselves, we draw the analogy from the proverbial speech made by the Christian Christ from a mountain top to his multitudinous audience below. It means telling it like it is. It means telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But means something even more profound, something more emotionally awakening than say, a pedantic adherence to a standard of actuality. It means appealing to the inner core of your audience, to their soul, to the part of their being that represent the moral consciousness of their humanity. When a son of the soil urges his country kinfolk to move forward with the 3rd Force away from “the putrid politics of the present and past”, forging an alliance that refuses to “pit one race against the other to attain or maintain political power”, that Son Mr. Editor is, “telling it from the mountain top”.

Societies produce all manner of Leadership over time, and generally they mould and adapt their style to confirm with the era, the politics of the day, or the distinctiveness of the constituency they aspire to represent. However, as any brief reconnaissance of the past will substantiate, societies torn by divisive and internecine conflict often produces a quality of leadership that is unique in its approach to the current issues, and tend to leap ahead of the pack in speaking to those issues and advancing ideas and proposals on how best they can be resolved. It is a style of leadership that goes for the high ground, that assigns blame to “we” instead of “they”, that call for changes from among “us” rather than among “them”. It is the kind of leadership in which public utterances take form in the expressions in the piece “Hope is Brimming in Guyana - New Force a People’s Movement“ authored by Peter Ramsaroop, and published by both independent print medias in Guyana.

Martin Luther King at the helm of the civil rights struggles in the United States of America extolled the religious virtues of “peace”, of “love”, of a sense of forgiveness and reconciliation. He urged his followers to develop “a kind of dangerous unselfishness”, of becoming the kind of person who possessed the “capacity to project the “I” into the “thou” in terms of demonstrative compassion and concern for fellow human beings. He spoke acerbically of the then Governor of Alabama whose lips, according to him, were “dripping with words of interposition and nullification“, but he dreamed of the day when the situation would be transformed into one “where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers”. Martin Luther kings’ style of leadership was one that spoke to his followers from the top of the mountain, from the high ground, appealing to that part of their core where the best abstract content of humankind reside. And that is a style of leadership we seem to be in short supply of in these turbulent times in our Nation.

Look, we can spend the remainder of eternity airing our grievances with each other and seeking capitulation by one group to the other in order to achieve a manner of closure consistent with accepted guilt and innocence. Or alternatively, we can, in the words of Peter Ramsaroop, “choose to stamp out the fire of hatreds instilled within us” by the relative few who benefit most from such incendiary group interaction, and “take back our country”. I believe the that the latter is the only credible choice. And since by virtue of years of manipulative cajoling, enticing and coercive efforts, no base group is likely to trust the perceived organizational arm of the other, a transitional exodus towards the new and populous people’s movement of 3rd Force politics should be as natural as osmosis.

Guyana need many more Peter Ramsaroops who are prepared to speak to our people from the mountain top. We had and have every other kind and style of leadership in abundance but this one. I firmly believe, without overtly or covertly making any analogous link between the two personalities, that Martin Luther Kings’ hopes and aspiration in respect of the cognitive growth of his Nation was no different than those being harbored by Peter Ramsaroop in respect of Guyana. And he speaks on it from the mountain top because he understands that you have to cultivate and plant a sense of one-ness, a sense of collective responsibility, a sense of forgiveness and acceptance, in order to harvest the dream of “ONE PEOPLE, ONE NATION AND ONE DESTINY”


Keith R Williams
Atlanta, Georgia
keiwillia2111@bellsouth.net