Dear Editor,
Small Island Developing States (SIDS), like The Bahamas, despite all appearances, are really negotiating this fraught journey, as independent, democratic states, blindly.
A new global order has arisen, and we are simply not sentient or savvy enough to foresee when or how the G20 high-speed locomotive tracks will switch direction, under our patched-up, little steam engine choo-choo train.
We are truly blind, and indeed suffer all the disabilities that accompany it. We rely heavily on the aid of bigger and more powerful others to negotiate this 5G world.
Somehow, as this Bahamian choo-choo train chugged along, our now almost 50-year independence track, rose-tinted international cooperation, changed to teeth-baring international demanding.
Despite our boastful bravado whenever something doesn’t go our way, we simply do not have the intellectual or intelligence power, technology, international reach, physical power or presence to direct the global narrative or trend.
This creates, for SIDS, like The Bahamas, an economic, moral and social existence based on blindsight.
Blindsight, in basic terms, happens when the visually impaired, through being taught, persuaded and conditioned by repetitive practice, learn to negotiate a sight-driven world.
Without even realizing it, The Bahamas has increasingly relied on blindsight to see us through.
We are being cajoled, conditioned, caressed and coerced into constitutional, economic and far-reaching demographic positions and directions that, more often than not, our cycle after cycle of elected leaders, have very little precognition powers or knowledge of to say no!
Treaties. Foreign communiques. Suitcase-rich investors. Ninety-nine-year Crown land leases. Top-down foreign policy demand constitutional changes.
Shantyism expansion. Domestic policy finessing by foreign NGOs. Called to the carpet conferences, meetings and dinners at embassies and the UN now, an ever-present presence of social media, are all examples of how blind SIDS are being led through blindsight.
The narrative and direction is not ours. It’s theirs. We are being conditioned to pick up peanuts without bumping into the walls being built around us.
If we can first recognize the fact that we are blind, and rely on blindsight, then SIDS will become alert as to how we are being led by the narratives and directions created by larger developed nations and their donor-funded special interest groups.
With the advent of the internet and the global reach of trendy hashtags, leaders and their eloquent speech writers should, by now, be vigilant to always steering clear of fad and of the moment phrases and ideas, which alert greater powers to the vulnerability of our blind position.
Where SIDS stand in terms of our place on various world league tables, differs widely depending on the issue at hand.
However, one thing is sure. If our leaders continue to go around the world advertising our blind and blindsight position and continue to ask for a proverbial disabled parking spot, because we are poor, small, an island, Black-governed and blind, then we can be assured of only one future outcome — more of the same.
Larger and more powerful nations are saying, in unminced, adult-sized, uncompromising words to nation states like The Bahamas, that all the international disabled bays are taken right now. Park that argument somewhere else.
— Charles Clarke
