Together these men and women routinely produce children – in or out of wedlock – who learn as they have been taught; thus the troubles on our streets, the mess in our schools, the hypocrisy in some of our nation’s churches and for sure, much of the distress at the workplace.
That is why today ours is a lament for the Bahamian family.
We have previously expressed the view and studied conviction that the past half of a century has been a time of unprecedented economic growth in the Bahamas.
And for sure, we have also previously suggested that money making was so easy that many Bahamians were encouraged to believe that schooling beyond a certain age clearly made no sense.
In fact, there was much to commend this commonsense approach to the matter concerning the relationship between earning and learning; thus the everyday celebration of the man who – as the saying had it – pulled himself up by the bootstraps.
Bootstraps or no bootstraps, the fact remains that it was America’s isolation of Cuba [via trade embargo] that laid the foundations for year round tourism in the Bahamas.
Thereafter the money flowed.
And thereafter, things as they once were in the Bahamas came to an end.
And since there is a price to be paid for everything, there was a commensurately high price to be paid for the easy money that came this way between 1960 and the year 2000.
That high price was paid in the form of family disintegration.
To put the case bluntly and perhaps crudely, as more and more money flowed in to the Bahamas more and more Bahamian men and women ‘discovered’ that they no longer ‘needed’ each other; thus the ease with which they entered relationships and thus the ease when they left them.
Interestingly enough, all of this takes place in a Bahamas where so very many Bahamians – inclusive of so very many of this nation’s loutish men and women who routinely profess Christ as Lord and Savior.
Nowhere is contradiction seen as clearly as it is to be observed in a dread mix of religiosity and licentiousness which pervades the lives of so very many Bahamians.
Here we dare say that this phenomenon knows no class barriers.
Indeed, this is a feature that makes The Bahamas such an interesting study.
And for sure, we do presume that these wounds and conflicts routinely deny intimacy; routinely undermine family life – and just as routinely conspire to produce children who [made in the image of their fathers and mothers] in their time reproduce the dread cycle of pain.
It is this social reality that has pushed so very many children into the reluctant care of grandparents – especially their grandmothers.
Nonetheless Mothers’ Day is still revered and Fathers’ Day is still being dismissed in a so-called thoroughly ‘modern’ Bahamas.
Indeed, such is the extent to which motherhood is sentimentalized and magnified in today’s Bahamas that there is scarce any real public commentary about the extent to which very many Bahamian women routinely abuse and mistreat their children.
By the same token, such is the extent to which fatherhood is minimized, shirked or neglected outright, there are very many who are hurting because of this society’s tendency to stereotype them as inherently uncaring; loutish and brutish.
Despite the gloss, reality is far more complex.
And indeed, Bahamian men and women are equally responsible for the mess that abounds. Here we would have no mention about the so-called emancipation of the Bahamian woman – if that freedom brings with it the need to abandon or neglect children.
Here we would add that it is no real emancipation when a woman decides to bring to term a child that she will not or cannot love.
Here take note that we are absolutely convinced that it was the break-down of the extended family in the fifties and sixties that spelled the end of one kind of social order and the emergence of a new.
The old order was centered on life in the yard; a world where generations of kin lived together; and where children were tended by parents, grandparents and a bevy of cousins living nearby.
Interestingly, this is a world that is today quite familiar to some of the ‘newest’ Bahamians – namely those of Haitian descent.
Today’s modern Bahamian would have none of this – thus the allure of the latest gated community [no pets and no children needed or wanted].
In such a world, everyone is encouraged to do their own thing – whatever that happens to be in the moment.
Here we hasten to add that the provision of housing says little about home-making. As some of the littlest and the youngest Bahamians might answer, a house is not necessarily a home.
