A Track Record of Failure

While this is what hundreds of Bahamians routinely do, this time around things were decidedly different; this being due to the fact that very many of these Bahamians went to Arawak Cay at the behest and on what seemed to be quite well-intentioned advice proffered by prime minister, the Rt. Hon. Hubert Ingraham and the Rt. Hon. Perry G. Christie, his parliamentary counter-part.

Incidentally, the advice proffered had to do with some event or the other put on by artists allegedly and purportedly concerned with peace; thus their moniker, artists for peace.

Sadly, this effort – successful or not – was soon eclipsed by the nasty reality that crime did not skip a beat in either its incidence or intensity; in truth, the bloody beat just kept on and on as it has for as long as we can remember.

Sadly, the beat continues.

And for sure, we are sore afraid that the bloody beat will continue so long as the so-called ‘authorities’ continue on their current track; one that calls on them to ‘invest’ more time, more money and more man-hours in ventures that have already proven futile.

Interestingly, even as the bloodshed and mayhem continues, it does so against a backdrop of social delinquency and other neglect. On occasion, this neglect involves leaders who blithely throw good money behind bad in ill-conceived social experiments, some copied – if not in dollar denominations from their North American counter-parts, then verbatim, from the same sources.

So the Americans have their Freedom of Information Act and we need ours.

And so, the Americans also have their working schemes for Unemployment Insurance, and we have ours.

And more ominously, the Americans – at least some of the more demented and vengeful who live in Texas – have their ways of killing condemned prisoners – and so, we need some such for our great little nation.

As the mimicry continues, so does the real blood that continues to flow.

As the blood flows, so does the bloodcurdling cry on the part of some of our scariest citizens for even more bloodshed; this time at the behest and sanction of the state.

In response, some politicians and some priests have gone into over-drive in their perfervid efforts to pander with the purveyors of blood-lust and vengeance.

Tellingly, some of the nastier expressions of this phenomenon are reserved for people who are evidently quite ill. Here reference can and should be made to people – very often men – who hurt children and women; thus in those instances where a child has been sexually savaged, the braying call would be for this so-called ‘God-fearing’ society to rid and cleanse itself of the miscreant in question.

Evidently, these moral cretins who call for such ‘cleansing’ are themselves totally mistaken; people who are demonstrably ill need treatment, not punishment and a large dose of wrath.

We would also argue – and in the same vein – that when a child does poorly in school, some brave soul might do himself and the public some good by at least considering that the child’s parlous performance might have something to do with the child’s dismal social situation and circumstances.

Evidently, if an infant child is disgorged hungry and in distress on to the street and sent to a school in a swamp and then and thereafter to a classroom that has no teacher, that child is being put on a track – as it were – to nowhere.

Or for that matter, why should a society like ours pretend surprise when young people decide that they are interested in making money, no matter what it takes to do so since money-making is the be-all and end-all of social existence in this place.

And so it came to be that education and so-called ‘book-learning’ are frowned upon in some instances, feared in others – and reviled by most. Instead, heroes and social lions are made of any number of crooks, magicians and money-grubbing scalawags.

Our youth see these things, understand some of them; and then and thereafter, pattern their lives after those of their elders. And so, the bloody beat continues.

As this society continues to fall in upon itself in an orgy of inter-personal violence, we are led to the conclusion that, one of the sadder facts of life in this brutalized place has to do with the fact that so very many of our leaders are themselves quite lost; some of them fast asleep.

We fear that some others – on both sides of the political divide – are totally awake in a miasma of ignorance; thus their desire to do more of what they have already been doing in their so-called fight against crime; all of this notwithstanding the fact that they have demonstrably failed.

At the current rate, their track record of failure is fated to continue.