Dear Editor,
Let me start my letter by stressing that there is absolutely nothing personal directed at no one. but I believe if we should be in this together, then together should be the key word.
There are certain letters written to you, of which just by reading one or two paragraphs I have an idea by whom they were written. I try to avoid reading the name of the person writing to you before reading the letters to avoid being prejudiced while reading.
On reading “We are all in this together” I recognized the genre. I can clearly remember my father asking me when I became a policeman, “Did you look up the meaning of the word policeman or police-officer in the dictionary? You are just 19 years old. Before you go out there beating on your chest telling people that you are a policeman you should know the meaning of the word and what it stands for.”
Those things from my parents have always lingered with me, so using my dictionary and Googling is not strange to me. I am trying to avoid using the term “politician” because when I googled the definition of the word “politician” it is stated “a person who acts in a manipulative and devious way typically to gain advancement within an organization.” When I Google the word “devious” it states, “showing a skillful use of underhanded tactics to achieve goals” and the explanation given is “he’s as devious as a politician needs to be.” Reason why I usually write “people in government”.
Emergency loans from Holland have always been necessary and as we should know, with Holland nothing is for nothing. For that matter there have always been conditions when countries lend others money – for instance, “you have to support me in the UN”, etc.
I believe that as time went by, moneys allocated have ended up in the hands of the politicians, among others, so Holland knows who to touch for certain things to be exposed and here we have politicians trying to use the guilt-trip tactics on the civil servants.
I am not a politician in no sense of the word and when I do not agree with certain decisions taken by government I usually look for someone close to government and let them know, before I write to you about it. I would expect if we are all in this together then we should get together and enlighten each other of how it has happened in the past and let each other know who we are dealing with.
COVID-19 does not discriminate neither should we. What I know is that if I have 10 guilders and the other person has 1,000 guilders and both of us lose all our money, the person with the 1,000 guilders lost much more than me. That is my explanation for “the bigger you are the harder you fall.” There are some points in the last paragraph of that letter that I agree with, but as I mentioned before, yes, we are all in this together. “Together” being the key word.
Speaking about together, there are a whole lot of “small supermarkets” in every corner of the island, which really have not been affected by the pandemic as other businesses were. When I look at who is working in those “small supermarkets” I do not or hardly see someone looking like me working in those “small supermarkets”, but we know who the owners are, and that is a type of business that we all have to patronize, whether there is price-gouging or not. Is the new normal going to be stringent (price) control on all businesses and permit holders?
I have also noticed that there is an increase in the cement business and the drivers of dump trucks with particular nationals with two specific speaking accents. The new normal should become “St. Maarteners first” and nobody should dare accuse any St. Maartener, or for that matter anyone who is of that opinion, of discrimination.
Do not we expect more people to be locked up? Do not we really know that Holland knows where the moneys have been going? And who is partners with who? I will repeat: The bigger you are the harder you fall.
Share, do not hoard. I did not say “bad spend”, I said “share”. People’s patronization enables one. Share.
Russell A. Simmons
