Sometimes it seems as if there is a culture where every thing imaginable is permitted. In some instances, there are practices and behaviors that were once considered so taboo that they would not be mentioned in polite company.
We suspect that these changes are part and parcel of a cultural transformation that has been spawned by a tourism culture that focuses on ‘sun, sand, sea and sex’. In a sense, therefore, hedonism becomes the order of the day.
There is also a sense where there is an idea that every thing is permitted. In this regard, it is often suggested that there are literally different strokes for different folks.
This work that is ours takes us into very many knowledge realms. One of them involves religion and ethics. Today we initiate some reflections on who we are and why so very many Bahamians are ill-disciplined, undisciplined and some times down right evil.
Put otherwise, there is a sense we have that suggests that this once beloved land of ours is today afloat in a quagmire of moral contradictions. It wants to see itself as decent, respectful and law-abiding, but yet, in its heart of hearts – The Bahamas knows itself to be a place where corruption is endemic.
In this regard, we hasten to note that we are in full agreement with David B. Hart when he suggests that “every nation with any pretense to civilization must be governed by some regime of civic prudence, possessing the power to place certain restraints upon public transactions.”
In his elaboration of his thesis, he argues that “without such a regime, a society cannot assure its citizens any measure of genuinely civil freedom.”
This genuinely civil freedom is according to him a “freedom that only a rigidly observed social courtesy – necessarily confining and somewhat artificially ceremonious – provides: freedom from other people’s bad taste.”
In some instances, outrage goes well beyond mere bad taste.
In this regard, note well that Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Perry Gladstone Christie has made any number of trenchant observations about the impact of crime on Bahamian society. One that he made to one of his party’s conventions resonates. In that speech, he suggested that “the level of violent crime in our society is simply unacceptable. The level of viciousness in the commission of murders and rapes and robberies in our society is simply intolerable-“
In that same speech, he asked rhetorically – so to speak – “Tell me, what gives these thugs the right to smash somebody’s front door down and then march up the stairs and rape a man’s wife right in front of him with a gun pressed against his head?”
And as he elaborated, he asked this poignant and pointed question, “What kind of animals, what kind of brute beasts have we created in this land? What kind of animal can chop a woman up right in front of her infant children? What kind of mindless savage can shoot someone in his head just because he looked at him the wrong way?”
Like the prime minister, we too need answers.
We suspect that a part of the answer is to be found in our failing homes, our failing schools, failing church establishments and to a more generalized failure of leadership.
There is also a sense that we have that very many Bahamians are victims of misplaced household priorities. Some of them are convinced that some of whatever resources they have should be put on searching for the next ‘party time’ event.
This might explain how it comes to be that so very many of these people put so very real resources into the health, education and nurturing of their children.
Compounding the matter is the strange situation where so very many of these children are unleashed onto the world, armed with a clutch of so-called ‘sponsor sheets’. This – of course – is but one other slick euphemism for begging.
We are convinced that is behavior such as this that lays the moral foundation for that culture of dependency, that ethic that says that some one else should work for the money. Thereafter all the slick Bahamian need do is to ask for his share. Others of a more pugnacious nature take matters into their own hands. These are the types who so incensed this nation’s prime minister.
The time has surely come for Bahamians to understand that whatever this land becomes is subject to their choices, whether informed or not.
For our part, we would wish that we embrace a culture that is focused on life and the preservation of human dignity.
The Bahama Journal
