Happy Republic Day
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
February 23, 2004
BARRING a sudden, lingering appearance of un-forecasted rain, Guyanese and their overseas visitors will be celebrating Republic Day with "pride and passion" all day today.
Like Christmas and cricket, Republic Day celebrations have a unifying effect on the country's multi-ethnic citizenry. If at no other time, these occasions see people of all races or ethnicity share, laugh, and dwell and talk as family.
Guyana needs this spirit of tolerance, acceptance and togetherness to saturate the minds of people not just on Republic Day, but every hour of every day of our being, across the country's landscape and in every fact of family, community and national life.
That Guyanese will be celebrating the country's 34th republican anniversary with pride and passion, as President Bharrat Jagdeo urges in his Republic Day message, there is little doubt. Float parades, the flaunting of apparel with prints of the Guyana flag, and the zest with which able revelers will be gyrating to local and Caribbean music, will tell it all.
But as we seize and cherish the moment, calls echo for us to temper our festive mood with pledges to direct our energies, time and resources to moving Guyana forward at a faster pace.
It's known around the world that we are a unique people. By infohub.com's account, Mashramani, though it has carnival-like similarities, isn't the same as carnival in Brazil or in Trinidad and Tobago.
Says the Specialty Travel Guide: "GUYANA is not quite Caribbean, and not quite South American. Guyana is Caribbean because of its historical past, its quaint colonial architecture and friendly people. It is South American geographically and anthropologically, with land areas that would swallow most of the rest of the Caribbean combined.
"Guyana is Eco Tourism country. Here jaguars roam, huge rivers are the major highways to the interior, indigenous Amerindians can be found leading traditional lifestyles, the waterfalls dwarf even the tallest buildings and Indiana Jones would be right at home searching for El Dorado's, Sir Walter Raleigh's fabled City of Gold. This is Guyana..."
We have an opportunity today to reemphasize our uniqueness by shedding our ethnic, race-hate baggage wherever it lurks and demonstrate the sense of care, consideration and togetherness that unify us during festive seasons such as Christmas, Phagwah, Eid and Mashramani.
In our editorial on Saturday, "Enriching our cultural heritage," we alluded to E.B. Taylor's definition of 'culture' as including, "knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
Influenced by such a profound definition, we pointed out that for us, enriching our cultural heritage must mean the way we ultimately relate to one another as Guyanese, not just as one ethnic group of people to another, but also a structure of living that dictates that we work, live and achieve fulfilling lives as one people.
We believed then, and still do, that future generations of Guyanese must be able to inherit from us "a structure of living," that is, a lifestyle of industriousness, of moral uprightness, of kinship community, evolving from our productive support of our country's motto of one people, one nation, one destiny.
Happy Republic Day!