Bahama Pundit

Prom and Circumstance

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

One of the blessings of the severe economic downturn may be the moderation of some of the worst excesses of the annual prom season, which was yearly becoming gaudier.  Perhaps this is a good moment for the country to reconsider what the prom has become and what gave rise to its excessive pomp and circumstance.

High school leavers should enjoy this rite of passage, celebrating the completion of years of schooling and adolescent discovery.  But, for most school proms, the line between celebration and materialistic excess was crossed many prom nights ago.

Rites of passage, with the guidance of the adult community, are meant to cultivate within our youth some of the values and responsibilities of emerging adulthood. 

This is why the prom and related events are planned by students, with prom night akin to a quasi-adult stepping-out, with fancy dress and some of the usual parental restrictions on nights-out relaxed, but not abandoned.

Proms also reflect prevailing social attitudes and mores.  Most of us have seen stories chronicling racially segregated proms at high schools in the United States and attempts to jettison these lingering vestiges of Jim Crow decades after the legal structures supporting segregation were dismantled.

A Rush to Judgment

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Last week, horrendous reports that a five-month old baby girl died after being sexually abused ricocheted around the country producing shock and horror -- and fear that living amongst us are some who might commit such a heinous crime.

Thankfully, our fears were unjustified, though various officials are still investigating the circumstances surrounding this tragic death.  Moreover, while the handling of this matter by health and police officials is under review, both appear to have acted out of an abundance of caution.

More Culture Wars in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

"Bahamian nationalism is a nebulous thing, difficult to describe...Trying to get a handle on what is Bahamian is like trying to catch a fish with one's bare hands." - Nicolette Bethel

Last week's article on Bahamian identity and cultural activity generated some comment from the cognoscenti.

Two inter-connected points emerged from that discussion. There certainly are institutions, laws and resources to support and protect Bahamian heritage, but our cultural industries are nonetheless in a perilous state of decline.

Any attempt to analyse why this is so must look at where we've come from. As College of the Bahamas lecturer Ian Strachan put it, slavery convinced black Bahamians of their inferiority while colonialism robbed all Bahamians of their confidence.

Culture Wars in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

You might not know it, but there is a fire burning among artists and intellectuals who believe we are in grave danger of losing our cultural heritage - all the things that make us Bahamian.

They say that the products of Bahamian culture - our music, theatre, literature, art, buildings and folkways - are under-rated, under-supported and under threat.

More to the point, they argue that the disintegration of our cultural attractions over the years has led to a tourism product so barren and boring that one trip up a deteriorating Bay street completes a visit.

According to architect Pat Rahming, the services that deliver a unique experience are what makes a destination successful. And in our case, those services - defined as tours, attractions and entertainment - have been allowed "to crumble, rot, or go out of business."

In other words, there is no Bahamian brand, a term which refers to how we package and market the Bahamian way of life - the things that distinguish us from other countries, and that are expressed through the cultural products mentioned above.

Reforms On The Way To Change Our Healthcare Paradigm

by Larry Smith

According to Health Minister Hubert Minnis, the government will soon propose major medical reforms that can be expected to spark a huge debate in parliament.

A centrepiece of the proposals will be a nation-wide prescription drug plan that will feature a computer database of patients, as well as an education and follow-up programme to ensure that people take their medications and make necessary lifestyle changes.

The reason is that we are facing a healthcare crunch similar to that faced by the US - costs are skyrocketing and resources are running out. The big challenge today is to find a sustainable solution, something that requires a "paradigm shift" in the healthcare industry, experts say.

In other words, we will have to change our frame of reference from over-reliance on tertiary medicine, which focuses on expensive hospital care, to lower-cost preventive medicine that is more patient-driven. What does this mean? Well, it costs $60,000 a year for the Princess Margaret Hospital to keep a patient with kidney failure alive - and there are more than 200 patients undergoing dialysis as we speak.

Falling Into Racial Traps – Part 3

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

One of the primary reasons we continually fall into racial traps is a purposefully induced amnesia which whitewashes and bleaches history, rendering it incomplete because of the same racist agenda which produced the transatlantic slave trade and its brutal aftermath.

A stubborn and sinister racial trap is the diminution of the underpinnings for and the historical reality of the transatlantic slave trade.  Far too many still believe that this trade was just another example of slavery similar to other forms of slavery throughout history.

Some go so far as to attempt to soothe their historical conscience and consciousness even by equating that trade with various practices of Africans who may have enslaved fellow Africans.

Falling Into Racial Traps – Pt. 2

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

Racism and prejudice do not always flow from hatred.  Its genesis is simpler, as stated in last week’s column: “There are degrees of racism, but they are all founded on the singular proposition that one group is intrinsically unequal or inferior to another.” 

Such racism becomes diabolical when it is fastened to power and used to degrade or destroy a category of people based on capricious racial codes intended to serve systems of supremacy, both social and economic.

Many of America’s Founders were learned men committed to the idea -- if not the fact -- of equality.  They were also slave owners who “loved” their chattel so much that even enlightened men such as Thomas Jefferson, America’s third President, appears to have produced at least one child with his slave Sally Hemmings.

Falling Into Racial Traps – Part 1

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

It is quite easy to fall into racial traps. Thankfully, with the election of Barack Obama some of those traps are becoming more obvious, if no less disturbing and often just as tragically comical. 

The latest insult black Americans are facing after generations of racial injury and injustice is the weird notion by many more whites than one might imagine that Obama is really not black after all.   

This is odd because for some, he is, in the words of a racist song, “Barack, the Magic Negro”. And for others he has magically gone from a black Senator to a mixed-race President of the United States.

Abaco and the Need for Heritage Tourism

by Larry Smith

HOPE TOWN, Abaco -- In 1976 the late American writer Alex Haley won a Pulitzer Prize for Roots, a historical novel said to have been based on his family history, starting with an African named Kunta Kinte who was kidnapped into slavery.

The book was adapted into a sensational TV mini-series that played endlessly on ZNS whenever election time rolled around. And while it later transpired that Haley's specific genealogical claims did not pan out, in the end that did not matter - they were generically true.

Although critics condemned the book as fraudulent, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr put it this way: "Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination."

Tough Call could produce a similarly fanciful account that would be just as accurate in its own way - an idea that took shape this past weekend while attending Hope Town's Heritage Day.

Happy Groundhog Day!

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com.

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day Phil Connors, an egotistical television weatherman wearily relives Groundhog Day over and over again. 

Unglued by this numbing repetition of a single day the Bill Murray character invents increasingly creative ways of killing himself.  But after every suicide attempt he reawakens to yet another Groundhog Day and the wheel of misfortune begins once again.  

Mercifully, he eventually breaks the pattern and literally discovers a new day.  In real life some of us are similarly transformed while others slog through seemingly endless Groundhog Days.

Truth be told, most of us live somewhere between Groundhog Day and the day after: between tedium and transformation.  Yet it is the general direction of one’s life that determines its eventual trajectory.