It is with this proposition that we insist that something quite infernal is going on throughout the public service.
Teachers, nurses and other hard-working people who protest unsafe and unhealthy working conditions are having to explain why their pay should not be cut.
Something is dreadfully out of whack when a teacher who protests the fact that while school is "open" students have no supplies, no desks, no chairs or that the building itself is decrepit.
On other occasion, teachers are fearful for their lives, having been threatened with harm by this or that tear-away brute of a child.
The same kind of thing has happened – and as we are told is still happening – in Her Majesty’s Prison; a place that some say is inherently unsafe.
In recent memory, the entire prison compound could have been described as a ‘crime scene’.
If recent accounts concerning murder most foul are to be believed, the troubles in that place continue.
Regrettably, some of the men and women who become bureaucrats in the public service quickly allow power to rush to the heads; and as it does, these people become powers to be feared in the same kind of way that Bahamians under slavery and colonialism were made to fawn, dote and other-wise kow-tow to their so-called superiors.
It is sad that these cruel traditions persist.
Sadder still happens to be the fact that those who now oppress their brothers and sisters were themselves once the objects of slave-master and colonial designed disdain.
But as we recognize, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
What remains the same is the human capacity to hurt other human beings, some time for sport.
But there is more. Not only are teachers, nurses and other hard-working people being subjected to this abuse, those abusing them sometimes take mocking advantage of them.
On occasion, politicians routinely crank up their speech-making machines so as to afford themselves some easy identification with this or that block of voters and workers.
This kind of work invariably involves some grand occasion or the other where the workers in question would be thanked, congratulated, and otherwise lionized for the yeoman’s work they do.
There is always some neatly packaged parcel of clichés that go on and on as to how these hard-working people go above and beyond the call of duty.
There are also times when the hardest working of all – some man or some woman – is singled out as the living expression of selflessness.
All of this makes for some of the most excellent public relations ever.
Things are often made even more delightful if some light refreshments follow the proceedings.
In a way, this stuff is just a tad too tragic for more words.
Indeed, these events – when contrasted to what is done on a routine basis – serve to underscore the fact that hypocrisy sometimes knows no bounds.
This is epitomized when teachers, nurses and other hard-working public sector workers are routinely abused, threatened and who – on sad occasion – are forced to show cause why the little that they are earning should not be further reduced.
This reeks of wrong and hypocrisy run amok.
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.
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.
