The Tribune

ABOUT 1,445 years before the birth of Christ, a book of laws was written by Moses for the Israelites giving them guidelines as to the way in which God expected them to govern their lives.

The book of Leviticus contains the laws “for all-time throughout the ages.” It told man that he must decide “between the saved and the profane and between the unclean and the clean”.

Today that law still holds true, but modern man has lost his power of discernment. He has pushed God’s laws aside and lives by his own rules — in other words he does what gratifies his personal desires — be it right or wrong. And when he has made the wrong decision, if he doesn’t end his days in prison or an insane asylum, he is dispatched to an early grave by a bullet from a gun in the hands of another wayward soul.

John Donne, a 17th century English metaphysical poet, likened man and his soul to a compass. He described the soul as the “fixed foot” of that compass, which sits in the centre. However, when the other foot of the compass “far doth roam, it leans and harkens after it, and grows erect, as that comes home”.

Today, man in general has lost his moral compass. He has no fixed centre to pull him back from his own destruction.

This world has gone mad — and through social media, we are all transfixed in horror at that madness – at man’s inhumanity to man.

However, as we cannot take on the world, we shall concentrate on our own scattered islands, which seem bent on self destruction.

In almost every segment of our society – from the top to the bottom – too many men and women are out for their own self-gratification, disregarding the rights of others, and their duties to their fellowman.

Several years ago, a dejected young gynaecologist remarked that he was participating in a factory that was producing the future destruction of this country — children bearing children. He was referring to the gynaecology ward of the Princess Margaret Hospital.

Today, there are many persons, and many organisations heroically trying to rescue these lost children through many after school programmes.

In the “old days”, the grandparents played a stabilising role in the life of their grandchildren. While their parents were off to work, grandma, and grandad, past working age, were at home to take care of their grandchildren when they returned from school.

Not so today. Too many of today’s grandparents are in their thirties, still of working age. And with no grandparents at home, today’s children are on the streets, joining gangs, disrupting the peace of a community, or aimlessly sitting on walls, smoking pot. The jail is overflowing. Too many murder accused are roaming the streets awaiting their day in court. Meanwhile they are either frightening potential witnesses into silence, or quickly dispatching them so they can never go to court to testify against them. When HIV/AIDS shook the community, we were told of certain men who decided to satisfy their sexual cravings with young school girls, thinking they were safer with them because they were still too young to be infected with the feared virus.

We were also told that we would be surprised to know who some of these men were, who had not only impregnated these children, but had also bought the family’s silence.

From the first page of our history down to the present, The Bahamas has had its problems. As one would expect there was no perfection in any generation.

The late Sir Etienne Dupuch, born before the turn of the last century, saw the first electric lights switched on in Nassau, the arrival of the first motor car, and sand streets replaced by macadam. He read of the Wright brothers’ first flight from a beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — the same year The Tribune was born. He served in the First World War, went through the years of prohibition, was a crusading member of many of this country’s early social upheavals, using the columns of this newspaper to bring about important changes that Bahamians now take for granted. He saw the birth of political parties, and held firm in the belief that the PLP was the natural child conceived by the many mistakes of the UBP. After a few years into the Pindling regime, he agreed with those who said the leaders of majority rule made the UBP look like virtuous Sunday school boys. He died almost a year to the day before the Pindling regime was defeated after a 25-year rule. He had predicted many of the problems we are trying to solve today.

The problems that we are faced with today can be traced directly to those years when in the seventies drug traffickers used these islands as their stepping stones to the United States. Many Bahamians, from the lowest to the highest, were caught up in the nefarious trade.

A 1984 Commission of Inquiry confirmed what we already knew – drug trafficking had polluted every level of our society, not only contaminating our police force, but even extending rapacious claws into the cabinet. Today’s evil is the whirlwind that we are reaping from our narco-dollar years.

We shall never solve our problems until we come to grips with the country’s dysfunctional families.

From childhood these children— boys and girls — have to be taught to respect their own bodies, to understand their duties to their Creator, their family, their community and their country.

It is from more responsible families with restored values that a higher standard of government can be built. That hope is well into the future, but that future will never come unless and until, we recognise the problems and start working on them today.