The Tribune

AT a public consultation the other night a man approached the microphone and started with the words, “I know I am just a small man.” He used the words small man almost apologetically, as if he wanted the audience to think he was insignificant, unimportant because he did not own a big business or to feel sympathy with him if we, too, were not the big shots in the room.

He repeated the words “small man”, unrelated to his physical stature but reflective of what he shared that he said made him so. His mother was a straw worker, his father drove a taxi. He himself had some sort of related tourism enterprise. The room was packed, standing room only inside and a few dozen more on virtual and I can pretty well guarantee that not a single person in that room or watching online thought of him as a small man in the way he meant it as “not mattering in the scheme of things”.

Small men and women matter and it’s about time they stopped selling themselves short.

It’s the small and medium size businesspeople, even the micro businesses, that keep the country’s economic metronome ticking. The fruits of their labour reverberate. Tick-tock, tick-tock (not to be mistaken with the viral video medium), just a steady drumbeat of daily activity tick-tock that flows through the economy, the bus driver who shows up, climbs into the worn seat, turns the key and heads out on the road picking up riders on their way to work who might not be able to get there if it were not for that #10 bus. It’s the straw worker whose grandmother started next to the fish stalls along Nassau harbour decades before and paved the way for her to have a comfortable stall in the modern World Famous Straw Market today. It’s the teacher’s aide and the janitor and the hospital worker and the woman who tosses the newspaper in front yards at 4.30am and the garbage collector who scoffs at being called a sanitation engineer because he knows exactly what he does and he’s proud of doing it well. Try to get by without them and see how far the glamour of a tourist haven or the continuation of community life goes in their absence.

The problem is that when someone says “small man” in The Bahamas we instinctively know what he means. It’s a wave of guilt or sympathy we feel for the guy who is never going to make it to the top. And that is because we have been reared to respect wealth over hard work, position over compassion and power over integrity.

That is not meant to imply that all who are powerful are evil or that success should not be applauded. The reality is that we also don’t respect success as much as we should, a subject about which this columnist has written many times only to suffer the rancor of those who disagree.

But in this case, what we mean is that a hard-working man or woman in any position - from that bus driver to the grandmother who put her kids through college weaving straw - is not small. That driver, that straw worker, that janitor help carry the country and the load they bear is only diminished by their own view that they are small.

By thinking of themselves as small they do themselves a disservice. They debase their own legacy by dissembling their own self-worth.

And, ironically, it’s a Bahamian thing. In other cultures, and in fact universally, small man has an entirely different meaning. It refers to a character flaw, not professional or socio-economic status.

Nowhere outside The Bahamas could I find a reference to a common cultural expression of the small man meaning someone whose father drove a taxi. How ironic it is here in this country when we all know the power of the taxi driver and have never forgotten the lessons of that day in November 1957 when 200 taxi drivers united to create a blockade, bringing air traffic to a complete halt at what was supposed to be the opening of the Nassau International Airport and instead turning it into the day they had to cancel all flights.

Small man can also be small minded. It can also speak to a type of thinking that is narrow in scope or a type of repugnant behaviour. Confucius looked at the concept of the small man as one with a bias. Here in his words: “A gentleman can see a question from all sides without bias. The small man is biased and can see a question only from one side.” Elsewhere he wrote, “A great man is hard on himself, a small man is hard on others.”

So to those of you who call yourselves small, please look in the mirror and see proud instead.

And personally, to the sweet gentleman who called himself a small man, we understood what you meant. We just don’t think of you as small and hope you will soon see yourself through our eyes.