Three decades ago, a popular song declared that Nassau had gone ‘funky’! While we are not too certain precisely what the lyricist had intended, our surmise today is that it had something to do with the town becoming more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated and, in a word, more American. What is interesting about those times and these is the stark contrast between how people lived then and how their children and grandchildren live now.
In those simpler times, crimes against persons and property were themselves also simple. While people were incensed and outraged by so-called ‘crime waves’, very few people were murdered. By analogy, in those simpler times, conflicts between generations turned on simple issues. By contrast in these days when information is streaming in from all sides and through so many channels, a farrago of mediated messages threaten to drive people to distraction.
We see evidence of this in the high and rising level of fear and dread in today’s Bahamas , where no day passes without the blare and broadcast of murder, mayhem, violence and the amplification of distress. An already bad situation is made even worse by the fact that news from everywhere is always so distressingly bad. In the Bahamian case, there is now a multi-media representation of disaster with reports of murder, rape and robbery taking the lead.
Crime and the fear it spawns has become such pervasive aspects of social life in The Bahamas that few Bahamians ‘bat an eye’ when reports come in concerning the latest victims. This ecological fact of life was shattered last week when a pastor and his wife were savagely attacked, tormented and brutalized. This community was similarly convulsed two years go when another beloved cleric was murdered, and before that a Roman Catholic nun was killed on church premises on Deveaux Street .
What is interesting about these horrific acts is that they served as extreme punctuation marks, exclaiming the news that murderous criminals in our midst had neither fear nor respect for anyone. To many Bahamians these assaults upon church leaders marked a further descent into debauch by brutes who had already been left so messed up that they felt no compunction of pity for anyone.
What concerns us most about this spiral of criminality is that it points to the reality of multiple failures on the part of a multiplicity of social agencies in The Bahamas. More surprising still is the fact that successive governments have given mere lip service to doing something real about the problem, of crime in this country. Apart from the reality that crime is itself ‘big business’ and
ﾠﾠthat many Bahamians routinely break any number of laws in order to ‘get over’, the truth of the matter is that Bahamians are, in their majority, only concerned about lawlessness when their interests or property are affected directly. This is why crimes against persons and property continue to escalate, despite the best efforts of the police. In instance after instance, reports surface concerning the fact that some of this nation’s most ferocious predators are often shielded by their neighbours, family and friends.
When criminals are cloaked and shielded -sometimes by their mothers – the entire community suffers. Today, in the specific instance of the criminals who murdered Father Thompson and those who made the news last week, there are Bahamians who know more than they are saying, thus effectively retarding the work of the police. When any community reaches this low level, and when trust is diminished, everyone pays a high price.
As we have previously suggested, when terror strikes home, our nation’s leaders must be reminded of the level of blame which attaches to them. Delinquency and dereliction of duty are grounded not only in the people who commit egregiously heinous crimes against others, but must – in part at least – be laid at the doorsteps of government, business and other leaders in civil society. If this nation is allowed to continue on this path, the road to ruin is certain. In the meantime as more and more Bahamians are victimized, the question arises as to what, if anything, can be done to stop the rot from getting worse.
We believe that while government has a leading role to play in dealing with the crime question, the Church, too should redouble its efforts to extend its message and its assistance to society at large. In a Bahamas which is being subjected to massive world currents, there is an urgent need for leaders at all levels to understand that accustomed ways of ‘doing politics’, ‘doing business’ or ‘doing church’ must give way to new modalities and new mentalities. This might reach the point where politicians, business persons and pastors come to the realization that they must work together for the common good. While this is easier said than done, the essence of the matter is easily perceived when the focus is put on the need for the cultivation of more trust and civility in social life, and for the incidence of these to be given greater salience in social life.
If politicians, business persons, pastors and other leaders in The Bahamas were truly committed to building a genuine commonwealth in The Bahamas, they would begin to trust each other more, be more civil in their social intercourse and otherwise match soaring rhetoric with decisive and purposeful action.
Editorial, The Bahama Journal
