Many years ago I remember my mother saying to me that people only hear what they want to hear, and see what they want to see. Back then I tried to hear what I wanted to hear without understanding that indeed I was hearing what I wanted to hear.
But at the time I thought that I was hearing everything that was happening around me.
If this sounds silly just talk to people who live close to busy thoroughfares or people who lived in the vicinity of the Princes Street incinerator. If you are accustomed to vehicles passing all the time and brakes screeching then after a while your ears become attuned to the sounds.
I was in New York, in Brooklyn to be exact at my sister. She lived on Rockaway Parkway, close to the Brookdale Hospital. The first night in her home I simply could not sleep. The passing cars and the wailing ambulances were too much.
However, after three or four days I stopped hearing them, so much so that when I visited another sister I could not sleep because of the deathly quiet. It was the same with the people who lived on St Stephen’s Street in the city or west of the incinerator.
Many of them could not smell the smoke that emanated. Those of us who lived away from the incinerator would always get that smell when we enter the area.
When the Guyana Elections Commission decided on the recount it detailed four stages. The tabulation of the votes was merely the first. The other stages included determining the valid votes. The final stage was the report by the Chief Elections Officer. That report would comprise all the sections and clauses determined by the order issued by the Guyana Elections Commission.
What has emerged since the vote count in March is that the rules keep changing. In the past the vote count was all that mattered. The Chief Election Officer would offer the final tally and fair or unfair, people accepted it.
Times changed. Messages were sent out and people heard what they wanted. For example there was talk about corruption in Government circles. But talk as some might there were those who refused to hear.
There were killings and home invasions. People away from the scene did not hear the pain and cries of the victims. It was not until these things began to happen to them that they began to hear what earlier victims said.
There have been other cases of people walking round with selective hearing. There was the order by the Guyana Elections Commission that dictated the terms of the recount. The order contained four parts of which the tabulation was only one.
Suddenly, people began to hear only the tabulation. The other parts of the order were simply ignored. People who claimed that they were law-abiding citizens began encouraging legal forums to break the law.
Why did they not hear that the elections would turn on the final report by the Chief Elections Officer? It did not suit them so they simply could not be bothered to hear.
How else could one expect Mia Mottley to proclaim that the tabulation was enough to identify a winner when that was only one part of the recount order? How else could people actually make that conclusion in the face of the rules of the recount?
But the PPP must be admired. Its communication campaign was powerful, so powerful that it attracted the international community. Suddenly the only person singing from a different hymn book was the coalition.
It was only in the last month that the communication tide shifted. How effective is this shift is left to be seen.
