“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” ~ Proverbs 22:6
An article titled “Anguilla, Did We Shoot Ourselves in The Foot?” written by a hurting middle-aged native observer, which appeared in the June 10th edition of this newspaper, caught my eye. The author skillfully asked the question, did we shoot ourselves in the foot.?
Shooting oneself in the foot suggests that one does something stupid which causes harm to oneself in some fashion. Can we honestly say that, what was allowed to happen was indeed an accident?
While the author laid out his points very carefully, I don’t think he went far enough. As an indigenous Anguillian, I was privy to most, if not all, he posited. Yet, we stood by and watched as a series of Anguillian governments sold their soul, in this case, our homeland, for a mess of pottage.
Anguilla was in the right place at the right time, sort of backed into tourism, and it was decided by the powers that we were unlike all the other Caribbean islands in that we would present a high-end product. It worked for a while, but we decided to change horses in the middle of the stream somewhere along the way. So, Anguilla was no longer the high-end destination we started as, which leads one to ask who’s to blame?
To answer that question, we must see what each Government contributed to the tourism problem. There may have been a master plan, but somewhere along the way, the floodgates were opened, and Anguilla was no longer known for its exclusivity. So, the master plan was scrapped, and the pursuit of the Yankee Dollar became tantamount to our place in the global community.
Consequently, little ole backwater Anguilla had jumped to the head of the line. Our banks, high-end hotels, gave employment to anyone who wanted to work. We had seen this happen to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. We saw it next door with our French and Dutch cousins, and yet we didn’t learn from other people’s mistakes – even though we were admonished to avoid the pitfalls of our cousins.
There is plenty of blame to go around. No one gets to walk away from this train wreck with clean hands. But first, and foremost, we became a people who abandoned God and, as the saying goes, the chickens have come home to roost. Perhaps Historian Colville Petty O.B.E captured the mood of the island best in an article he wrote for this very paper many years ago entitled, “The Seven Seals.”
Mr. Petty’s “Seven Seals” foreshadowed all our current problems. He saw the progress that was unfettered tourism. He saw social decay, materialism, and parentless homes where children raised themselves with the help of television. He saw exposure to all sorts of vice, pornography, love of guns, gangs, violence, drugs, and sexual promiscuity. He saw unsupervised children on the streets at night, drinking, smoking, using foul language, and the like.
He called out the church leaders for their silence on many issues confronting the island. But, conversely, our Government, led by Osbourne Fleming, saw not the problems facing the island but the progress being made, so much so that he opined that things were going so well that he said: “The light at the end of the tunnel, of which I spoke during the dark days of 2000-2002, is so bright it threatens to blind us.”
Tourism brought many problems that our leaders were ill-equipped to deal with. Our leaders focused primarily on the revenue going into the treasury. There seemed to be no plan for going forward. If the hotels were full and people were working, that’s all that mattered. One taxi driver said, “Anguilla, Nice.”
The assertions of the author are not unfounded. He has chronicled the ills of our small island and how they came about. It is obvious where the priorities lay. We were trying to make up for all the years of benign neglect by the Central Government in St. Kitts and, by extension, the British Government. However, there’s no excuse for what has happened and continues to happen. The introduction of Comprehensive Education and tourism can be seen as the catalyst for the beginning of our troubles. Teachers were ill-prepared to execute the rigorous curriculum of Comprehensive Education and, according to Vivien Vanterpool (Teacher Arthwin), they had to resort to their ingenuity and expertise.
Teacher Arthwin asked, “How far have we come since 1967? He goes on – there is a mixture of success and failures. Victories in the Albena Lake Hodge Comprehensive School saw the number of Graduate teachers increase tremendously, academically and professionally. But he continues, the losses are many and varied. The education system was primarily geared to academic results to satisfy the upper end of the tourism market, while Vocational Education was neglected.
Teacher Arthwin also noted that social development had not kept pace with economic growth. The Government lost many of its civil servants, in the lower grades to the private sector, due to inadequate salaries.
Another noted failure was the neglect of young children, who were left unsupervised because parents had to hold down two or three jobs to make ends meet. He continues, the lack of parental supervision is the source of many behavioural problems of our students in our schools and in society. Another problem was the abolition of corporal punishment in our homes and schools. Governments must shoulder the blame for children’s misbehaviour in schools and their respective communities.
The abolition of corporal punishment is an infringement of the Good Book. Proverbs 13;24 states, “He that spareth the rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him.” And again, in Chapter 22;6, “Train a child in the way he should go and when he’s old, he will not depart from it.”
The article written by the native observer, like Colville Petty’s “Seven Seals” once again has brought many of what ails us to front and centre. What we as a people do, going forward, remains to be seen. Till next time may God bless us all, and may he continue to bless Anguilla.
