The Bahama Journal Editorial:


Happily, there are still some Bahamians alive – with most of them being this nation’s more elderly citizens – who remember that there was a time when most Bahamians were bonded together in community.

These now senior brothers and sisters would also recognize that there was a time when so-called quite ordinary people cared for their sick; educated their children; worked hard, served God and otherwise knew how to love their neighbors as they loved themselves.

Sadly, some of these elders in this land can now vividly recall how they felt once they found themselves marooned in a land where hustling seemed to have become a preferred way of getting up from under.

And for sure, these elders would also have fond memories when sudden death was the exception rather than the rule; this being so because the Bahamas of their youth was one where murder was rare.

That things have changed for the worse is self-evident; and so we need say little more about the obvious.

But even as we might recite any number of horror-stories that readily illuminate how far we have fallen as a people; we will do no such thing.

Such a recitation will do more harm than good.

In addition, suffice it to note that, there are today thousands of Bahamians – most of them professing Christians – who routinely and painstakingly work for the rebuilding of family life; the renewal of community and more generally speaking, the regeneration of that spirit of unity that once held us safe and secure.

And so, while there are times when we feel as if all is lost and that this beloved land is headed straight to hell and imminent destruction; we are pleased to note that such times come and then they go.

Indeed, we are absolutely convinced that the Bahamian people are strong enough in their shared faith that, while weeping might endure for a night, joy will come in the morning.

Put simply, as a people steeped in a kind of knowledge that passes all understanding; we know that the Word speaks truth when it says, “with Christ in the vessel; we can all smile at the storm”.

Here we must – if only for the sake of clarity and the elucidation of principle – insist that, this is easier said than done; and for sure, as community disintegrates and as more and more Bahamians wake to find themselves mired in debt and up their eye-balls in distress; some of them are reaching that point where they are being wracked with despair and troubled by a myriad of fears.

In their fear, some of these people routinely project some of their deepest fears and phobias on this or that dreaded outsider; in the meantime, the search is on not only for scapegoats, but also for some panacea, easy fix or placebo. Indeed, our country has become that kind of place where practically everyone has some kind of solution to all of the ills that currently beset most of the people who live here.

Regrettably, these so-called ‘solutions’ are hardly ever successful. Indeed, there are instances where the proposed solution is evidently as heinous as the offence that triggered the nasty recommendation.

Here our thoughts and memory revert to a suggestion by a leading cleric that men accused and found guilty of rape should be flogged with the cat o’ nine tails and thereafter castrated.

This utter nonsense was greeted with some approval from some of the more benighted sectors in our society. In more recent times, there have been other less savage calls for other kinds of solutions to this country’s spiraling crime wave.

One that stands out is an insistent call for people to some how learn how to control their anger. There are also recommendations that they could help themselves if they would just learn one or two anger management techniques.

In truth, these sweet sounding nostrums count for little in the on-going effort by some to understand what is going on in today’s Bahamas.

Our take on the matter at hand is somewhat more nuanced. While these techniques might be well and good as tools in the hands of social workers and others of their ilk; they count for next to nothing in the heat of battle between two or more people who are strung out on either alcohol or other psychotropic drugs.

And this is precisely what happens to be the case in situation after situation where violence is used as the preferred means of resolving conflicts.

This kind of so-called resolution marks the clear end of community, since death itself is the ultimate separation from life.

The sum of the matter, then, is that we are called –individually and collectively – to get back to some of those basics revolving around love and real care that once held us together in common purpose.

November 3rd, 2010

jonesbahamas