Crime will continue to menace and terrorize The Bahamas as long as Bahamians refuse to take to heart the truth in the old dictum that the health of a nation is the wealth of a nation. Money spent on good schools, family life education, job training and other social goods must come to be seen as investments rather than costs. Bad homes breed bad people. Bad schools ‘graduate’ bad students. When institutions fail, society germinates criminals. It really is as simple as that. This country is in trouble. Its moralizing and civilizing institutions are failing. Its homes, schools and churches are failing in their mission to imbue young Bahamians with a spirit dedicated to excellence, leadership and service.
While many Bahamians may wish to remain blind to the truth that this society is sick, there is a small group of thoughtful observers who are convinced that the high and rising incidence of crime in The Bahamas is nothing more and nothing less than the fever chart of a nation whose institutions are failing. When this radical analysis is put, there is invariably the self-serving defence on the part of government and its social partners that they are doing their best. Apparently oblivious to the fact that most of their efforts are flawed and misconceived, they routinely promise to redouble their efforts, thus doing more of what they have always done. Once locked into this nonsensical spiral of misconception, poor design and shoddy implementation, confusion beckons. This is where The Bahamas is today in the so-called fight against crime. Lacking vision and leadership, but convinced that brave talk, clever public relations gimmicks and community talks and walks can help, many politicians, police officials, pastors and other community leaders routinely vow to ‘take back the streets’. These efforts – in their totality – are mere palliatives and placebos.
Criminals will continue to terrorize this country as long as The Bahamas fails to create and establish healthier families, better schools and more socially responsive churches. Put otherwise, as long as criminals are being generated, nurtured and steeped in a culture of cruelty, there will be one catastrophe after another.
Sadly, this nation has reached the point in its disintegration where there is demonstrably an abundance of evidence pointing in the direction of class warfare. The social threads which once held community life together have frayed so dramatically and so insidiously that a generation of young Bahamians has come to accept deviance as a social norm. This explains why there is so little public outrage when home grown terrorists strike out with impunity against rich and poor, black and white, pastor, politician or peasant.
Today, report after report coming our way, speak to the reality that home-grown terrorists and human predators are destroying this nation. The latest outrage concerns the information that a pastor and his wife were brutalized and tormented by a monstrously fiendish group of bandits. What is interesting about this and other excesses is that the public at large is apparently so numbed that practically no group has emerged to demand that government and its social partners get their act together to effectively tackle the problem of crime in The Bahamas.
As the record so eloquently attests, successive governments in The Bahamas have summoned commissions, undertaken studies to deal with crime and the fear it evokes. Similarly, many of our church and civic leaders routinely preach about the ubiquity of evil, and the need for Bahamians to follow the right path. Despite the intensity, sincerity and fervour of the preacher’s exhortations, many brutalized Bahamians continue to tear each other to pieces. While the police will, no doubt, search for the criminals who brutalized and tormented the family which was attacked, their work will count for little if nothing is done to prevent such attacks from occurring in the first place.
The point is that even if criminals are brought to justice and even if they are ultimately locked away, the damage to the community has already been done. Indeed, the evidence available suggests that the high and rising incidence of crime in The Bahamas is itself nothing other than a reflection of failures, delinquencies and derelictions of duty on the part of a number of institutions in this country.
The conclusion of the entire matter is that leadership at all levels of this society has failed to do all that it can to understand what should be done to make this nation a better place. There is blame enough for successive governments, a broad cross section of business and other civic leaders. The time for decisive action is past due.
Editorial, The Bahama Journal
