POLITICOLE: 7 Things to accept about life in the Bahamas

As of Monday, February 27, 2017

By NICOLE BURROWS

“Seven people killed in 48 hours”?

Crime is not decreasing, and it will not be decreasing. Not now, not soon. And there is no political leader, no priest or no other person who has ‘the answer’ to crime.

Any crime-fighting initiatives short of radical tactics, military or martial law, will be ineffective against the worst crimes in this country. People are under the illusion that the court system works for the good of the people and serves justice on victims while punishing the guilty, but the system is broken and does not work to the benefit of justice.

Politicians and attorneys can pay as much lip service as they want, and maybe to themselves they accomplish micro amounts of success in their efforts, but without an overhaul of the little Mickey Mouse methods used by law enforcement, lawyers and judges, there will continue to be gaping holes in the system that cannot be filled in the short or the medium term. As ‘The Potcake’ Leslie Miller said, if there are no repercussions for anything, there will be no differences made in the ‘war on crime’. And every party sending someone forward to talk about ‘fixing’ crime better be damned careful about what they say and promise - it cannot be done.

You can start to try but don’t fool yourself into thinking you can make a difference if your efforts consist of the same pussy-footing manoeuvres practised by the same types of leaders.

The people won’t get smarter.

The reason why we suffer so many social ills is owed to so many uneducated and undereducated Bahamians squeezing through the education system at warp speed and with few or no credentials. Education is not just about book learning, it’s about cultivating personality, social development, learning tools for navigating real life and making informed decisions. If more than half of all high school graduates in the Bahamas have failing grades and graduate with nothing, the society you end up with is similar to but worse than the one you have now. There are probably at least two and likely up to four generations of Bahamians who have fallen through the education cracks and until they get re-programmed to function in a productive society, there will be no example of a productive society for the others who follow them.

The economy won’t ever really recover, because the nature of productivity is not applicable to Bahamians.

The nature of productivity in the world is changing. There is nothing to recover to unless Bahamians have nothing to do with their economy ... in other words, they become a territory of another country with resources to invest in 21st century productivity. With no productivity to make it competitive, a permanently sluggish economy will result in and reflect greater unemployment, which is but one factor in the desperation that leads some poorly mentally developed Bahamians to commit violent crimes. Perry Christie himself called it an incubator for criminality. One would think if he knows this, he would have sought the help of others with sense and produced at least one feasible action plan in the last five years.

Besides, Bahamians as a majority grouping cannot be wealthier than anyone else in the Bahamas. That’s not what Bahamian leaders are concerned with. The so-called leaders are status quo-maintaining and nothing of significance gets accomplished for the greater good of the people because those who lead are not good at getting things done.

There are some lazy bastards in the House of Assembly who think they are working just because they move their lips.

And because they have convinced themselves that they are doing something, they never leave the jobs in which they are wasting the people’s time.

You can’t improve a country filled with people who keep the status quo, and who are led by status quo-keepers.

I would think by now that would be more than evident. Moreover, they are all too familiar with the people and circumstances about whom they are required to make difficult decisions, and they seem to come down on the wrong side of this process most of the time.

Praying for change without changing amounts to nothing.

Bahamians need to step out of their hyper-religious worlds and understand and practice the practicality of faith - any faith ... not just the one they follow. Religion is manmade. There is no right religion. And as long as religious people are in a majority and they look down on others of different faiths, they will stay divided and regressive as a nation.

White-man wig-wearing does not make attorneys smarter nor does it make them appear smarter, particularly when sitting before a council of white men from whom the wig-wearing barrister practice came, especially when they themselves are not wearing said wigs.

Wig-wearing puppets. And you want them to be innovative in the judicial system, set precedent that makes sense enough to be followed? When they wear white men’s headdress to make them look and feel relevant? I don’t know. Maybe the white man wig-wearing is the ‘black’ equivalent of white men in ‘black face’? Who knows?

None of them will answer that question honestly. None of them have the presence of mind for that level of self-examination.

But it doesn’t matter does it, if all they need is a title?

The alternative to the reverse ‘black face’ argument is that the white men’s wig-wearers are a people who so loathe themselves, or have no identity of who they are in the first instance that they must adorn the appearance of an ethnicity they do not possess.

Not to mention, as the council of white men sits before an audience of black attorneys, the councilmen have the sternest of faces while the attorneys are laughing their heads off. These people are a joke.

Your leaders, my fellow Bahamians, are a joke. They might as well take this opportunity to be swallowed up by the Donald Trump variety show administration, as it appears stupidity, ignorance and idiocy are the norm for those in charge.

‘Suspected marijuana’ in ‘ferl wrappings’ will always be a greater crime than drunk driving in the minds of ignorant Bahamians.

And they are not trying to consider anything different. For this reason, Bahamians are considered by many to be a lost people.

Politicians are as relevant as you make them when you interview them, and they don’t produce ‘news’ most of the time.

They prefer personal insults against one another that amount to mechanisms of laziness and insanity. Name calling can’t even escape Parliament. So lazy are they with their mental being that no one of sound mind can take them seriously or believe in them ... unless money changes hands. Andre Rollins, promising star he may have been a few years ago, has fallen from grace and blended in to the league of people like Loretta Butler-Turner, Jerome Fitzgerald and all the rest of the low stoopers who resort to name-calling and personal attacks. And in the process, they pretend to know something more than we do.

If you know something, if you have more information that will inform the Bahamian people, but you choose to keep it to yourself, then you are no leader. If it’s something the Bahamian people need to know, spill it. Say what needs to be said, because holding it close to you and threatening to divulge is the same as keeping it secret when it should be told.

If people who think the same way about the world and their place in it - PLP, FNM - are elected to serve as the government of Bahamians, the political landscape will remain the same, with the same problems. Beneficiaries, and prospects for the future as they have for the last decade.

Comments and responses to nburrows@tribunemedia.net