I’ve spent years listening to the silences of broken people. You can hear it in the way their voices drop when they speak about what they’ve lost, not just a loved one, or a home, or a piece of land, but the very belief that anyone will come to their defense. And nothing corrodes the human spirit quite like that kind of silence.
When you grow up disadvantaged, when the schools are crumbling, when food runs short, when opportunities are rationed by surname or skin tone, you learn to expect less. But what the soul never gets used to is injustice. Especially when it strikes violently, when it snatches away a daughter in a nearby hotel, a son in a hail of bullets, or a grandmother is evicted by men in boots and no one in a uniform listens. Not even to your cries.
I think of the unrelenting abuse the Afro_Guyanese community has endured–extrajudicial murders of hundreds, Benschop imprisonment, Waddel, Crum-Ewing, Boston, Mocha evictions, the Henry boys–over and over again, the list is long, the abuse unrelenting, justice absent. What a cruel injustice to our people!
The first time it happens, you rage. You scream, you call, you protest. You still believe the system might work. The second time, you feel the sting of betrayal. And then it happens again. And again. And slowly, something inside you changes. Not just your posture or your words, but your wiring. You begin to understand, not in theory but in bone-deep truth, that the system was never built for people like you.
It’s not just hurt. It’s something deeper. Psychologists call it moral injury. It’s the soul wound that forms when you believe in justice, but justice never shows up. It’s what makes mothers stop hoping. It’s what turns grieving fathers into alcoholics. It’s what teaches a whole generation of children to whisper their pain and shout their defiance. It’s why some young men set fires and don’t care who gets burned.
Not all retreat. Some fight. They form movements, organize in church halls, march with handmade signs, run for office, take to the mic. They become fighters, not because they’re angry by nature, but because silence was killing them. But even warriors get tired. Even fire needs oxygen. And when you’re fighting a system that erases you at every turn, the exhaustion is brutal. It’s grief that never gets to rest.
Others collapse inward. I’ve seen it in the eyes of people who stare past you when you ask what happened. “Nothing,” they say, even when their child is dead or their house is gone. They’ve absorbed the lesson of injustice, that their story doesn’t matter. So they don’t tell it.
And so the trauma deepens, not just for individuals, but for entire communities. When injustice is the norm, it becomes part of the air we breathe. It moves from parent to child, generation to generation. It explains the looting in the streets, anger in our classrooms, the despair in our villages, the violence we fear but can’t quite trace. We call it crime. We call it laziness. We call it hopelessness. But it’s something older and more vicious. It’s the legacy of unattended pain.
I don’t write this because I’ve lost faith in people. I write it because I haven’t. Because I still believe that a society that listens, that truly sees its wounded, can begin to heal. But there is no shortcut. Justice must be more than a word we say on the news. It must be a thing people feel in their bones, in police stations, in courtrooms, in village councils, in Parliament. It must be real.
Because when justice is denied long enough, something essential dies. Not just the hope of the poor, but the soul of the nation.
And once that dies, what’s left to save?
