Dear Editor,
Over the years while travelling I have always visited museums when possible. By doing this I have found out that, "What be is not "what is". In museum or musea one can see 'what was till what has become'. In so doing I have also visited authentic black museums in the USA and found out that a whole lot of inventions were made by slaves but patented by their owners. One of the reasons a lot of inventions are not registered under the original inventors' names. One could conclude hereby that the slave was very smart.
Accepted, because it took intelligence and insight, but I believe that necessity urged the creativity. They found ways to make tools to lighten their work. There are so many examples of taking credit instead of earning credit, but this letter is not about black history nor promoting blackism, it’s about forgetting the politics and political power. It is about making use of the urgency to rebuild Sint Maarten and being creative.
Use the urgency and necessity to be creative in the name of general interest and applying emergency measures. It is about the insensitivity of the businesses and especially the hardware stores. Irma came, did what she did, and left the whole of St. Martin upside down, and every, yes, every hardware store, both Dutch and French literally jacked up their prices by at least one hundred percent.
What made me write this letter to you so many months after Irma is the fact that two young people came to me and wanted to know, "If Holland could bring building materials to Sint Maarten in those war ships just like they bring the police cars too, because our mother used up all her savings trying to repair our house, and we still got a whole lot more to fix".
This hit home, because just everybody else, I too am experiencing the same thing. No question that there will be bureaucracy involved, but we know that our long but not so lost sister Suriname has a lot of wood. I also know that where there is a will there is a way, And I also know that there are still important ties between the ex-kingdom partners, so I think that that is also one of the avenues that could be used to get where we want to.
Take it or leave it, but the only thing is done on the part of government is that they are sitting with their arms crossed while the insurance companies are shafting everyone, even our own airport. There is a lot of millions floating around, which because of political power struggle and arbitrariness cannot reach the people and Mark Rutte comes to Sint Maarten and tries to insult the intelligence of the people by praising our elderly, who, everyone knows, need to be attended to themselves, but the Prime Minister does not let the people know why he came.
I do not believe that between the lines he is telling government that the elderly are doing more for themselves than government is doing for the people. So, then I must ask myself, is it Irma, is it the unscrupulous business owners, or is it the different governments, who is really the enemy to the people in this case?
When we put two and two together and we know that many ex-and present politicians have all kinds of business permits and are renting them out, and we know for years now that absolutely nothing is being done about price control, would not a chunk of those relief monies be indirectly going back to the original permit holders? So yes, am I for meticulously control of those moneys. And since that question from those two young people I would even say bring the material. We import everything anyhow. so why not see what for instance Suriname can do for us. Cut out the greedy, overzealous, inconsiderate middle man. That suggestion from those two young people sounds more and more like the way to go.
Necessity urges creativity. If this is not in the general interest of the country, what is? One of my father's philosophies in life was to educate through sayings and proverbs, and he would tell us to pick sense out of nonsense. One of his sayings was: the only people you should get even with are those who help you.
Russell A. Simmons
