We say ‘near’ because while the great nation to the north did and continues to shape popular culture, it has done little to foster respect for life or limb.
Instead, Bahamians – in their vast majority – came to expect that the American way of life called on them to make money the easy way.
For a long season, this did happen – money was made [ and spent] hand over fist particularly by those people who were ‘fortunate enough’ to be working directly for the Yankee dollar – thus the big house life-style of so very many of these people.
This could not continue indefinitely.
Indeed, as in all things human – this too had a life-line and a life-time.
One era may well be ending and a new one beginning.
We recommend that some thought be given the idea that things were already untenable in a Bahamas where its leaders grew comfortable with the idea that they could continue to borrow, borrow, borrow and thereafter spend, spend, spend – as if there was no tomorrow.
These same leaders thought that somehow or the other they could build – at little or no real cost – a so-called ‘great little nation’ on the very back of the United States economy.
This is – clearly – a fantasy.
While pundits and policymakers may disagree on this or that issue, we take it for granted that when they do speak or write, their work is often predicated on certain guiding assumptions – explicit or implicit.
We make this seemingly banal observation so as to underscore an idea that seems implicit in the thinking of the current administration and its opposition in parliament.
Both seem agreed that somehow or the other, things are set to return to ‘normal’ sometime in the near future.
This explains why there has been so much ballyhoo and hoop-la concerning unemployment benefits and other such short-term panaceas.
Clearly, the thinking is to the effect that stand-by measures are just what the doctor ordered. We demur as we wonder to ourselves whether the public response might be different were this nation’s leaders to revise their ideas and therefore understanding of what is actually happening.
What if there is no return to some so-called ‘normalcy’?
If wishes were horses even beggars would ride. So goes one of those wisdom nuggets we were taught so very long ago.
Suffice it to say that we are acutely aware of some of the dangers that routinely attend wishful thinking.
There is a price to be paid for everything. And so it has been – and continues – that having been taught that they could live like Americans, Bahamians are now also dying like some of them; that is to say violently.
But as important is the fact that few Bahamians in any position of either power or influence seem to take sufficient note of just how fragile the Bahamian economy just happens to be – with the bulk of its economy dependent on a United States dominated tourism and financial services sector based model.
There is all that idle chatter about the genius of this or that Minister of Finance or Tourism as the observer in question studiously ignores the fact that Cuba has been glaringly absent in the Caribbean equation.
As it awakens – so to speak – from its Rip Van Winkles’ sleep of half a century, the Bahamas and its sister nation’s in the region now have in Cuba either a great big brother or a major competitor.
As a big brother and partner, Cuba helps the Bahamas.
As a competitor, Cuba devastates the Bahamas.
This is but one imagined scenario.
Another envisages a disciplined and democratically socialist Cuba working in concert with its neighbors [inclusive of the Bahamas, Haiti, Venezuela, Jamaica and the United States of America] for the achievement of the common good.
But even as we dare dream of tomorrow, today we are sorely afraid that some of our leaders are mired in world-view and draped in garb laced with optimistic assumptions and presuppositions.
Indeed, these leaders are telling themselves that the worse is over and that they should therefore take no ‘rash’ action at this juncture.
But surely, what if business as usual is a thing for the dust-bin of history?
What if – as we suspect – the end of one era is being expressed and another is on the way?
And surely, what if what sounds like the death-pangs of one world order are merely the birth-cries of a new world coming into being?
