Having just celebrated the 181st year of our emancipation, somehow it’s not all that it was cracked up to be. We are forced to pause and reflect as to how far we’ve come and how much farther we need to go. Granted, the distance traversed has been a long and arduous one – one in which we have hit more roadblocks than we know how to deal with. As a consequence, we need to do some serious soul searching, for we seem to be stuck in a time warp with nary a clue of how to get out. We need to ask ourselves some serious questions such as are we truly emancipated? What are the markers that would indicate such? Emancipation is defined as the fact or process of being set free from legal, social and political restrictions. Can we say without a doubt that we meet those criteria?
Given that we are now a part of the global world, it is incumbent upon us to pay attention to what is happening around us, in the region, and in the global community on the whole, and to be more proactive in our own affairs. No longer can we stay in a vacuum despite what our leaders may think, and if they continue to bury their heads in the sand like an ostrich, then we’re living in a fool’s paradise, all to our detriment. Outsiders have always seen us as being in a vacuum. V.S. Naipaul wrote in his anthology series, entitled “The Overcrowded Barracoon,” that “the Anguillans have lived for too long as a shipwrecked community.” What does all of this have to do with us here in Anguilla? Bear with me and I’ll explain.
We cannot help but notice what has happened to Greece and Puerto Rico. It was reported in last week’s Wall Street Journal, in a piece written by Joseph Stieglitz and Mark Medish entitled “What the United States Owes Puerto Rico,” in which they talk about how Washington treats Puerto Ricans as second class citizens, and they came to the conclusion there are things that the US can do to help Puerto Rico. To prevent further hardships, Stieglitz and Medish listed a three point strategy. First, the US bankruptcy code eludes Puerto Rico – a change in that law would allow Puerto Ricans to get debt relief.
The second thing that would help is permission by the US to allow the IMF to assist the country. Presently, Washington rejects any IMF involvement. They would conduct an analysis that would ultimately conclude that most of Puerto Rico’s debt must be restructured or forgiven. The fact that they have no relief available to them, as does the fifty states, according to Stieglitz and Medish, allows Puerto Rico to “fall prey to the claws of vulture creditors is unjust and unacceptable.”
Third and finally, the US must take responsibility for its imperialist past and neocolonial present. Stieglitz and Medish contend that “Washington owes Puerto Ricans a future based on democratic legitimacy, financially and socially.”
The inability of Puerto Rico to fiscally manage its government has had a drastic effect on its population. It has been reported that as many as 400,000 natives have migrated to the mainland, simply because they saw no future in their homeland. People have sold off their properties for pennies on the dollar, in some cases, while a more affluent people from the mainland are moving back to Puerto Rico and buying up those properties. Those who have decided to weather out the storm are doing so by working two and, in some cases, three jobs to make ends meet.
Of course this catastrophe didn’t just happen overnight. It never does, unlike the problems facing New Orleans. Today the 29th of August is the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and, ten years later, some 100,000 black New Orleanians are still not able to go home. They were given a one way ticket by bus out of New Orleans under the guise that it would be temporary. One U.S. Congressman Richard Baker was quoted as saying: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
I brought up the two cases of Puerto Rico and New Orleans to illustrate what could very well happen to us. This morning on the Mayor Show, on Kool FM, we were discussing emancipation and the lyrics of Bob Marley came up in which he tells us to get rid of mental slavery. If we don’t look out for ourselves, no one else will – for just as the United States have neglected Puerto Rico over the years, so too did England neglect us.
Puerto Ricans can’t do anything to help themselves, short of selling off public lands and assets. We in Anguilla can’t do anything without first getting approval from the crown.
We are hemming and hawing right now about what is or isn’t happening on the island. We are waiting for our knight in shining amour to come riding in to make us well again. That’s a tall order, and maybe, that knight does not want to put on the armor and come galloping in to fix what ails us – or who knows, maybe he will, but time is of the essence here. We are not as politically sophisticated as we ought to be and if our past behavior is any indication of where we’re going, our goose might very well be cooked. They may read our passiveness simply, according to V.S.Naipaul: “That we are not well educated.”
We are a small country whose stock and trade are that we are very independent and, while we may not have the gold: we’ve got something more precious than gold, we’ve got land, something that a lot of our Caribbean neighbors can’t say, a fact driven home by V.S. Naipaul, when he said: “More than any other Caribbean community, the Anguillans have a sense of home. The land has been theirs immemorially; no humiliation attaches to it. There are no Great Houses as in St. Kitts; there are not even ruins.” We see what is happening to Puerto Rico and it can very well happen here. A lot of our young people have to leave Anguilla because there is no life for them here, and I think that rather than lose our properties to foreclosure, we will sell for pennies on the dollar to the highest bidder and leave. As you’ve seen, the US is yet to step up and bail out Puerto Rico, even as their archaic laws are partly to blame for Puerto Rico’s plight.
We, to this day, are still waiting for relief with our banking situation. The ECCB, whose job is it to rectify such problems, is more interested in cutting down on the number of banks in the region. For every dollar that they collect, 6 cents goes to a fund for the expressed purpose of making the bank healthy again. Why haven’t they done so? The United Kingdom recently gave millions of dollars to former colonies among them being St. Kitts and Nevis, but none to Anguilla, one of its Overseas Territories. When asked why, our Governor, Ms Scott, said it’s because our GDP was too high – it was over the poverty level. Seriously? We are just one report from a similar situation as Puerto Rico. Only time will tell.
Right now we are at the mercy of people who proclaim to come as friends looking out for our best interests. We should not let our guard down and accept at face value what we are being sold. The ECCB will tell us that they are looking out for our best interests! Really? Then why haven’t they fixed the problem? Let us not for a moment believe any of that crap. Sir Dwight, if he hadn’t telegraphed his hand so early in the game, might have been able to sell us that pig in a poke. His number one priority is his EC dollar and he will do whatever it takes to strengthen it. Since when did anyone for that matter have our best interests at heart? If Atlin Harrigan and Elliot Webster had not been the caring and daring souls that they were to sit and talk about how far off the beaten path we were, and how primitive and ancient we were, and then had the temerity to do something about it, where would we be right now? We keep talking about freedom and emancipation, but are we really?
If we are to survive as a small country, there has to be a plan for going forward. We can’t afford to get caught flatfooted. 100,000 New Orleanians were packed onto buses which took them away to unfamiliar places – as far away as California some 2300 miles away to uncertainty. Think for a minute what a traumatic experience that was. Here, we were again being uprooted against our will for the second time in our lives, the only thing absent this time were the chains. In Anguilla, a similar fate awaited us when, in the early years, we suffered through drought and many other ailments, and our so-called protectors were ready and waiting to haul us off to parts unknown. This time, it will be displacement by design. Let us learn from what is happening around us. We have to all be on the same page. It should be a one for all and all for one. If we continue to remain complacent and go along to get along, well then we will deserve whatever we get. Remember, no one is going to give you anything. For the second week in a row in the words of Frederick Douglas: “power concedes nothing without demand.” These people are not our friends.
We have always been looked upon with scorn. This is how V.S. Naipaul saw us back in 1969. He said: “Among the hilly green islands of the Caribbean, Anguilla is like a mistake, a sport. It is seventeen miles long and two miles wide and so flat that when the Anguillans give you directions, they don’t tell you to turn left or right, they say go east or west.” He had a lot more to say and none of it nice: “The place is rocky and arid; there are no palm trees, no big trees. Mangrove is thick above the beaches which look as they must have done when Columbus came… For more than two hundred years in fact, no one had really wanted Anguilla or had known what to do with it. The place was a mistake.”
I will reiterate my assertions that we live at a time where we can’t let down our guard. Eloquent speeches are nice. They show that you have command of the language, but speech alone will not get us one damn thing. And if we continue to sit on our rear ends and do nothing – allowing Rome to burn while Nero fiddles – then we are just as bad. Talk is cheap and it sounds very good. No one gives you anything without wanting something in return. We should have been able to figure that out by now. It is up to us to determine our own future. We can go about it in one of two ways. We can either demand of our leaders that which we want, or we can chose to do nothing but just go with the flow. We live in a country that has been blessed to have an abundance of natural resources.
As a small territory, we have to be ever vigilant, for if we don’t look out for ourselves no one else will. We may still be seen as a liability to the British taxpayer, as was claimed by travel writer Alec Waugh in his “Love and the Caribbean Anthology,” but he also asserted that: “It is possible in another ledger, in terms of hard currency, it is an asset.” Did he see something that we don’t? Are we so blind that we can’t see what we’ve inherited – that we have to have a Brit tell us, as far back as 1953? We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. An awful lot is happening around us, and I’m amazed that we’ve not learned anything. We keep doing the same things, and each time expecting different results. Folks, that’s Einstein’s theory of insanity and, as they say down South, “That dog won’t hunt.” So as the Mayor likes to say: “We don’t know what we want, till we get what we don’t want.” So till next time, may God bless us all and may God bless Anguilla.
