Dear Editor,
Twenty-nine years ago, in August 1991, the Internet went public. Those of us who grew up on this island before there was a World Wide Web came of age in a world in which information was not easy to access and, therefore, knowledge was more difficult to acquire than it is today. Way back then, but still not that long ago, very few of us could afford to learn by traveling to Europe, to the USA or to anywhere else in the world. The schoolhouse, books and magazines, one or two local newspapers, movies, magazines, radio, and (later) television were the means from which we got our information/representations and could acquire some knowledge.
Nowadays, propaganda (information/misinformation/disinformation) is plentiful and much easier to access. Consequently, knowledge is also more readily accessible for those who are curious, and who have the time and the means to do the research required to become well informed. It is unfortunate that there are still folks on this island and elsewhere in the world who, for all sorts of reasons, do not own a computer or a smart phone that would enable them to communicate with others instantly both locally and globally, allowing them to obtain information online, on Internet sites all over the world.
Three months ago, minus a few days, in my “Payback and Projection: the Impeachment of President Trump” (letter to the editor of The Daily Herald, January 30, 2020), I argued that the US Senate impeachment trial of President Trump was an “ill-conceived exercise in progressive projection and propaganda … the staging of a narrative designed to project onto others, onto the Republicans and onto President Trump, in particular, the corruption of the Democrats.” I opined that the US Senate trial was “a kitchen fire: lots of smoke” that had to be “deprived of oxygen; snuffed out promptly lest it erupts into an inferno precisely when the nation may have to battle a real world menace: the Coronavirus.”
Today, almost three months later, the Coronavirus/COVID-19 is a pandemic, a worldwide inferno. Have the Democrats and their powerful allies in the mainstream media (mass media) learned anything from their witch trial in the US Senate, their earlier failed coup d’état and Mueller Investigation? Not one bit! On the contrary, they have grown more enraged. Now, today, they are accusing their President of having fiddled while Rome was burning: of having procrastinated while COVID-19 was contaminating the US and the world.
In reality, this virus originated in communist China. Officials of China’s repressive communist government manipulated and misled the World Health Organization (WHO) on the matter. They also refused (are still refusing) to allow the WHO and Western scientists to participate in an examination of the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan province.
Today, officials of the communist Chinese government are engaged in a cover-up of their misdeeds, but the proof of their perfidy is indisputable: shortly after the outbreak of the virus, they suspended all travel from Wuhan province to other parts of China, thereby protecting all other parts of their country while allowing travel out of Wuhan to other parts of the world (to Europe, to the US, and to everywhere else). This may account for the rapid spread of the virus in Europe, in the US (despite President Trump’s January 31, 2020, early wise restriction of travel into the US from China), to Australia and throughout the world.
In his Republic, one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory, if not the most influential, Plato reviews a number of key philosophical ideas. “Justice,” the “just person,” the “just city,” the “origin of knowledge,” the “nature of reality” and the “problem of representation” are some of the key-subjects considered. Plato advises us to beware of representations: the “shadows on the wall of the cave” in which we are imprisoned. He urges us to break loose from our confinement; to exit our cave and examine representations in bright sunlight. But he warns us that once we have probed and pierced the veil of the shadows, once we have viewed them in bright sunlight, life back among our fellow cave dwellers will become a most challenging and dangerous enterprise.
Projection is a defense mechanism in which individuals attribute to others characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves. Reader, these are trying times. If you have access to a computer, Google: “YouTube out of shadows,” the interesting and informative video that was posted on the Internet earlier this month.
Gérard M. Hunt
Dear Editor,
1) Parliamentarians in meeting of April 22 said things like: … being sick and tired of us (St. Maarten) having to run to Holland every time (there is a need) to beg.
2) Alternatives of go-to private investors who might be ready, willing and able to bail out St. Maarten were offered by name. But what was not mentioned was: at what price to the people?
When it comes to looking for money to get us out of the mess we are in, we all know there is no such thing as “a Free lunch”, so even if under the present 10/10/10 rules we could go the route of private investors, at what cost financially and, more importantly, at what cost to our democracy will that be? Will we be selling our Government to these investors named by the Parliamentarian on the floor of Parliament? What would those investors consider an acceptable return on investment?
3) The President of Parliament suggests (demands) that the CBCS [Central Bank of Curaçao and St. Maarten – Ed.] “be called to order”, issue a license for a to-be-established National Bank of St. Maarten, fund it by repatriating some or all of St. Maarten’s share of the CBCS’ money abroad, and cut the umbilical financial cord with Curaçao.
4) Economist Arjen Alberts on April 22, 2020, explained “What can the CBCS do for us” in layman’s terms (he thinks possibly a band-aid for up to 6 months, after which financial disaster).
These 4 points I use to preface the following that I wrote on April 9 last, while pondering the pickle we are in:
Food for thought: What if, as the Corona virus pandemic hopefully starts getting under control, we get another Cat 5 (or more) hurricane this September? Who do we turn to? The Kingdom Gov’t again?
My take: After almost 10 years of trying, circumstances have proven that St. Maarten on so many levels cannot sustain itself as a “country”.
We lack self discipline.
We lack cohesion.
We lack the ability to raise enough taxes to afford to run an efficient government organization under normal circumstances.
We have a government apparatus that is too expensive for the quality and quantity of services available to the population.
We have government-owned companies that pay better than Fortune 500 companies.
We lack enough qualified human resources to properly and efficiently serve our population.
We lack mutual trust between consecutive governments and the population.
With 9 governments in 10 years, our elected and appointed officials (including me) have proven that they collectively lack enough maturity, knowledge, and often integrity to properly manage the affairs of the people.
On top of all of that, Hurricane Irma and within 2½ years now this COVID-19 pandemic have proven without a shadow of doubt that because of a myriad of reasons, we are financially, socially and economically unable to sustain the illusive dream of being an autonomous “country”.
By virtue of the size in numbers of our population and our total dependency on a single (now proven very fickle) pillar of economic sustenance (tourism), we seem to be destined to be an integral part of a larger community to which we will have to contribute in “good” times so that we can blindly and unconditionally depend on it in “bad” times (read: disasters, both natural as well as man-made).
As far as I am concerned it is time to admit: This “country status” experiment has failed on St. Maarten for, amongst others, all the reasons mentioned here above.
Time for a change of direction.
Time for a new referendum!
Michael J. Ferrier
St. Maarten
April 9, 2020
And today April 23, 2020, let me add:
Time to cut the financial monetary union with Curaçao (I agree with the President of Parliament on this).
Time to dollarize.
Time to get every resident of St. Maarten (legal and illegal) tested for the COVID-19 virus (I agree with another Member of Parliament).
Michael J. Ferrier
The ochre-colored African wind wafts through the Tanzanian veldt, ruffling the low acacia trees that grow scrubbily between august Baobabs. The sun is setting and the malarial mosquitoes start their evening hymn. In between the metropolitan mounds of termite nests an animal is waddling. Some would call it an ugly animal; it looks like an anteater: same oblong, awkward body and pointed snout. But unlike an anteater this animal is covered in reptilian scales, somewhat like a large, land-locked and ambling four-legged fish. The animal is called a pangolin and it is being hunted.
Hiding behind one of the termite mounds is Andwele, from the Bantu-speaking Nyamwezi ethnic group, and he is poor. He hasn’t been able to provide for his family in some time and his children are hungry: there has been a persistent drought in this part of Africa and Andwele has been unable to make ends meet. Never before has it taken so long for the rains to come. It is as if the climate itself has changed.
As Andwele was returning from his meagre farming plot in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro he stumbled upon the pangolin as the animal was breaking open a termite mound foraging for food. Andwele loves and respects animals but he hasn’t eaten and has a cousin that can get almost a month’s salary for a live pangolin. He catches the ugly animal but while he does so his heart breaks as it looks at him with pleading puppy-dog eyes. But Andwele is hungry and so are his children so he stuffs the pangolin in his rucksack and the next day travels to Arusha to sell it.
Three weeks later the pangolin has traveled 9,300 kilometers and finds itself in a small metal cage in a market in a medium-sized Chinese City. Although the city is considered medium by Chinese standards it is home to eleven million people. The animal is emaciated and covered in sores from being transported across the ocean in unhygienic conditions. It shares its cage with a bat, similarly covered in festering sores and lying listlessly at the bottom of its cage; resigned to its pending demise.
Soon the owner of the stall removes the bat, the pangolin’s companion for the past four days. The two animals have been sleeping together, breathing together, shitting together. But now the bat is gone; it is being skinned after its head has been chopped off; the owner preparing it according to the traditional Chinese method.
Two weeks later a mysterious, pneumonia-like disease is spreading rapidly in the densely populated city. But it is the Chinese New Year and people are traveling all over the world to be with their loved ones. One of those people is Xi-Li who has traveled to Bergamo in Italy to be with her family. To celebrate the Lunar New Year they decide to eat a traditional Italian meal at a trattoria on the Piazza Vecchia. Xi-Li hasn’t been feeling well; she has a slight temperature and a dry cough but she’s travelled all this way and decided to enjoy the special occasion. In three weeks she’ll be dead.
Also at the restaurant is Massimo. Massimo lives in New York but travels to his home town often. A week after his meal he travels back to New Rochelle and kisses his wife hello. She notices he has a slight temperature but he insists he is fine. It is the eve of their anniversary and tomorrow they travel to Fort Lauderdale to embark on a 10-day Caribbean cruise; first Port of Call the tiny half-Dutch-half-French Caribbean Island of St. Maarten.
A month after his cruise Massimo lies in an emergency hospital tent. He has been intubated with a respirator because he is too ill to breathe on his own. He might not make it. Ten thousand of his fellow New Yorkers haven’t. His wife didn’t. All across the globe life has drastically changed. Normal will never be the same again. The world cowers in fear of a new pandemic. Economies are collapsing. Oil prices have collapsed. Governments are struggling. Three billion people are forced to stay inside. And there is only one thing on everyone’s mind: COVID-19.
The above is just one of the scenarios for the origin of a virus that has been dictating the human experience for the past three months, but it is the most plausible (5G towers and lab-gown conspiracies aside). The renown scientific journal Nature mentions that “researchers have noted that coronaviruses are a possible cause of death in pangolins (and) are a good candidate as a source for intermediate spread. … Pangolins are protected but illegal trafficking is widespread. It is almost certain that they are the source, … likely having infected a bat with the bat infecting a human in turn … .”
The global spread of the pandemic and our ability, or inability, to manage the infection has highlighted the role environmental degradation and social inequalities have played in these unusual times. It has highlighted the global nature of the human experience and that an act of wildlife crime (exacerbated by a just-as-urgent but not as highly publicized climate crisis) has resulted in communities, economies and societies now being on the brink of collapse.
It is no accident that my native St. Maarten has per capita one of the highest per capita COVID-19 cases and deaths in the Caribbean region. The prioritizing of the bottom line over the welfare of citizens has been the focus for the economic development of the island since the tourism boom in the 1960s, with a reliance on a model dictated by fast economic growth to the detriment of environmental and societal safeguards. Island communities must now place focus on economic, social and environmental sustainability as our guiding principle should we want to survive.
One of the clearest and most obvious mistakes many of the islands in the Caribbean have made is an over-reliance on the Cruise Tourism industry. The Cruise Ship model for development, even before this crisis, has proven to not adequately account for the welfare of island societies and the natural resources critical to our ability to develop sustainably.
We should learn from this lesson and not have multinational tour companies dictate the governmental and economic policies of the Caribbean. Mass tourism on the islands, coupled with an unrestrained and ill-planned thrust to develop just for development’s sake, has resulted in significant discrepancies between various social strata, discrepancies further highlighted by the virus.
In order to emerge from this successfully the Caribbean has to alter the way we do business. Islands such as Bonaire should learn from what is happening around them, and islands such as St. Maarten and Aruba should learn from their own experience and move away from an economic model almost solely dependent on mass, lower-income tourism. Islands such as Bonaire and Saba are better positioned to emerge from this crisis scarred but not broken. Islands such as St. Maarten and Aruba, who have invested significant infrastructure into courting mass cruise tourism and budget-minded travelers, often to the detriment of the population and the environment, will be broken for some time and will struggle to emerge successfully from this crisis.
Now should be the time for a renewed focus on building the resilience of our communities; counteracting deforestation, reining in unsustainable coastal development, ensuring proper solid waste management, preventing pollution from entering our air and water, are all issues which exacerbate the negative health and economic effects faced by Caribbean residents in a post-pandemic reality.
As Caribbean people we cannot afford to lose focus; the region must get rid of the usual economic model that focuses on profit over people, further exacerbating income inequality. When we emerge from our houses we need to place emphasis on a more inclusive, sustainable future. After this crisis there has to, finally, be greater emphasis on the critical role the three pillars of Sustainable Development must play in terms of resiliency, especially considering the potential new crises in what is predicted to be an above-average Hurricane Season.
There also has to be closer regional cooperation, cooperation that does not adhere to the usual model defined by former colonial powers who apparently consider a billion-euro grant to Southern European countries more important than providing relief to former colonies whose natural and human capital have fostered their own economic development.
There has been no time in history which calls for a greater Caribbean unity than now as we emerge from one of humanity’s most existential crises. The old ways won’t work, and despite what we are going through we cannot function in isolation nor can we depend on former colonial countries and western or eastern superpowers to support our development; that much is clear.
But there are encouraging signs. The encouragement provided by seeing our Caribbean environment healing should push us to foster and encourage further healing. Being isolated whilst being unified as a human race, unified by our common human experience of being shut indoors, physically isolated from friends and family, should unify us as global citizens while putting emphasis on local solutions for our societal ills.
We cannot go back to business as usual; let us use the healing of nature to enter into a new phase of economic development, of finally being sustainable. Let us perpetuate that healing. Let us allow it to guide us into a more sustainable future. Let us ensure that wild areas and the animals that inhabit them are conserved. Let us manage our natural resources so that the goods and services they provide will be enhanced and secured. Let us make sure that the climate crisis is sufficiently addressed so that we can end poverty and global hunger so that people like Andwele are no longer forced to hunt wild animals to feed their families.
Let us ensure, as we emerge from our cocoons, that we are on the right side of History. That we rise from our confinement a renewed, holistic and reinvigorated Caribbean society.
Happy World Environment Day!
Tadzio Bervoets
Interim Director
Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance
Dear editor,
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought economies all over the world to a screeching halt. Planes are parked. Hotels, restaurants, car-rental companies and a myriad of other businesses are closed. Citizens as a result of decrees issued by government are forced to stay at home to slow the spread of the virus. The GDP of every country has suffered an enormous blow. Millions of jobs have evaporated and Tax income in general of governments has shrunk to a trickle.
How long will this continue? No one knows that for certain. What is known however, is that safely restarting the economy will be a long and painful process. Restarting too quickly is fraught with peril. Resurgence of the spread of the virus could put us back to square one and make all the sacrifice made and endured to date by everyone a total waste.
Restarting our economy unfortunately is also not completely in our hands. We have a tourist economy and depend on tourist dollars. As such we are totally dependent on tourists deciding to take a cruise or jumping on a plane with Sint Maarten as their destination. As long as Covid-19 hangs around the world and as long as there is no vaccine available to safely travel the prospect of tourists coming to our shores and populating our hotels and beaches, like before, is wishful thinking. It will take years to recuperate. Yes, you will get some tourists visits, but not enough to keep our heads above water.
People with healthy savings and companies with sound balance sheets prior to Covid-19 will be able to hold out for some time, but not forever. People without income or without healthy savings will be pauperized worse than before the virus struck. Companies that struggled to make ends meet before Covid-19 visited us, or companies suffering losses since hurricane Irma will be forced to close their doors permanently and expand the ranks of the unemployed. Crime will explode.
Government will not be able to meet its social responsibilities towards the needy, provide the needed health care for citizens, nor guarantee the safety and security of the populace. SZV will suffer substantial loss of income in the form of less premiums collected because of the closure of numerous businesses and a vast number of people without jobs. SZV will not be able to fund the operation of the hospital, nor pay for medication and critical health services.
This is the doomsday scenario we are confronted with. Government does not have the way nor the means to avoid this scenario without an astronomical injection of funds, more than you think, by the Netherlands. The Kingdom Council of Ministers has unfortunately embraced the advice issued by the CFT. The CFT however, has been shortsighted in its advice. The mission and expertise of the CFT is the supervision of the budgets of the countries in the Kingdom. The challenge we, as well as Curaçao and Aruba, are faced with goes way beyond the mission and expertise of the CFT. The misery that awaits us threatens our very survival and we have nowhere else to turn than to appeal to the responsibility and the decency of the government of the Kingdom.
Richard F. Gibson, Sr.
It is with deep sorrow we mourn the passing of our former colleague, the late Mr. Louis Duzanson, former head of the department of General Affairs Island Territory St. Maarten.
