Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” is perhaps the poem that depicts the Bahamas’ nightmare best. One need only to digest the following lines to understand what our land will be.
‘ A time there was, ere England’s griefs began, when every rood of ground maintained its man; for him light labour spread her wholesome store, just gave what life required, but gave no more. His best companions, innocence and health; and his best riches, ignorance of wealth.’
There was a time when life was simple and easy in this land. There were no homeless people.
Then politicians went to work. They were a greedy bunch then as they are now. There is no stopping them. We have come full circle in what is referred to as our phenomenal development; one branch of slavery has been replaced by another.
Today as I look at what is known as the Stafford Sands era that marshalled in this wondrous race for opulence, for bigger and better times. I view it as a curse; just as Oliver Goldsmith saw the England of his day falling into ruin and decay.
“But times are altered; trades unfeeling train Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose; and every want to opulence allied, and every pang that folly pays to pride.”
Think for a moment, what has happened here to keep on feeding this insatiable beast, this monster which was created by greed. This beast grows bigger and meaner every day. It gorges up the land. It continues daily to bring in opportunistic people from around the world. Haitians fleeing poverty, Mexicans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Chinese, English, Americans, East Indians, West Indians, South Africans, Guyanese, Russians, Canadians, Dominicans, and the list just grows and grows and the land dwindles.
Yes there was a time not very long ago when there was a division between rich and poor, when the dividing lines were colour and class. Not so today. During that era no matter how poor, decency, grace and manners were the order of the day. Murder was a rare thing, not an hourly occurrence as is witnessed today. When someone was being charged with heinous crimes the whole town. It seemed, turned out under the big tree to get a glimpse of the accused. Not so today, it’s an occurrence which has become a mundane part of our daily lives. How true these lines by Goldsmith “ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay”?
Decadence can be seen everywhere. There is no hue and cry when a local is beaten and robbed or molested. It has become so ho-hum, that it hardly gets mentioned in the newspapers other than a line in the court report. When the same thing happens to persons from other climes, it is ballooned, heralded in the media and published to the farthest reaches of the planet. The problem with all this push for development by outsiders is, it brings no real prosperity for ordinary Bahamians. The politicians give the people’s land away in what they call the quest for jobs. What a joke! They create these jobs not for Bahamians, our people, No! No! These jobs are created for illegal immigrants. These jobs are created for people from around the world. Not only are there the ones known as “menial” but the case is made by the “developers” for the “high tech” jobs to be filled by outsiders. No wonder many, many true Bahamians who obtain the training and degrees to excel in these jobs opt not to come back home, where they are treated like pariahs by their expatriate bosses, who in many cases themselves had to be trained by their Bahamian underling.
Successive governments boast of the magnitude of the land give- aways, hundreds of thousands of acres to speculators in the name of “development”. They used to be secretive about it. Now they trumpet it as a great accomplishment. Meanwhile the true Bahamian could not get a 50 X 100 lot to build a house on unless they pay their life’s earnings to these same foreign speculators who got the land for free. Some are so brazen as to tell us that they have set aside some acres exclusively for Bahamians. You can be assured that it will be in an area which they find will be hard to sell to their white foreign clientele. In our own country the foreigner blatantly discriminates against us. The perception is they are doing us a favour, to sell our land to us at exorbitant prices, land which was given to them by politicians who are the decedents of slaves. What a phenomenal farce!
Our politicians worship at the shrine of the beast and use us as fodder to feed its insatiable greed, til there is nothing left to give. Like Cracker Jack the more it eats the more it wants.
By: George Capron
Source: The Nassau Guardian
