Sometimes I go for a fairly long time without writing one of these columns. It’s not that I’m lazy or distracted by something else. It’s that I don’t think I have anything to say, and, based on long experience, there is a simple solution to this problem: Don’t say anything.
Then something will strike me as having a real connection to the Virgin Islands. It happened this weekend. I was reading the paper and came across a long op-ed piece titled “Italy Breaks Your Heart” by Frank Bruni in the New York Times. Most people who visit Italy have two responses: number one, God, what a great place and what great people, and, number two, God, is this place screwed up.
By now, you may be seeing where this is going. People have been saying these things about Italy for a long time, and life – a pretty good life for most people – went on. But Bruni, by his own definition, “well accustomed to Italians’ theatrical pessimism,” thinks that something different is happening now. He sees a people who are losing faith in the future of their country. And, in many cases, thinking about the unthinkable: leaving Italy. This is especially true of young people.
What is striking about Bruni’s column is the number of themes that connect to the territory’s situation. Here are some examples.
“Italy is what happens when a country knows full well what its problems are but can’t summon the discipline and will to fix them. It’s what happens when political dysfunction grinds on and good governance becomes a mirage, a myth, a joke. Italy coasts on its phenomenal blessings rather than building on them….” In a clear reference to mainland United States, Bruni asks, “Sound familiar?”
But there is also a familiarity with a slightly different flavor for the Virgin Islands. While Italy had Silvio Berlusconi, the Virgin Islands has its Senate, but beyond clownish personalities, Bruni describes “a closed system of favoritism that foils initiative (and) corruption and the cynicism it breeds….”
At the end, Bruni interviews a psychiatrist who says that Italy’s great problem isn’t its loss of dynamism or creativity. It is a growing sense of helplessness. The result: a people waiting for someone to come and solve their problems for them. As the psychiatrist says, “they’re waiting for Godot because no one is coming.”
Bruni asks the question, “is fatalism what comes after too many years of pessimism?” He is thinking about the United States, but the Virgin Islands applications are too visible to be ignored. There is a particularly poignant aspect to this situation when we think about political leadership. Rome has a new mayor, a political outsider, who is attempting to reform corrupt, outdated and entrenched systems while, at the same time, trying to pick up the garbage. It is not clear that anyone can do both, in effect, address real-time, operational crises and implement systemic and behavioral change at the same time. The mayor describes the situation as a “controlled emergency” and says that Rome is “salvageable.”
Gov. John deJongh Jr. came into office and immediately was confronted with the worst economic and financial crisis in a generation, in effect, an uncontrolled emergency. Just as it was bottoming out, the territory took an economic hit as severe as any state has experienced when Hovensa closed. All the while trying to manage a relationship with a Virgin Islands Senate whose sense of responsibility ranked right down there with Italy’s parliament and the Tea Party in Congress. The governor has steered the territory through these crises with what seems to be the least possible damage. Not something that gets crowds cheering, but a true measure of effective leadership.
The outcome is likely to be a look back several years from now at “what might have been” had there been no economic crises. That look back should not be used as a rationale for the kind of pessimism trending toward fatalism that Bruni describes in Italy.
These days, the word “special” is used in ways that mostly make you want to gag. But there is a reality that, like Italy and unlike a lot of others, the Virgin Islands is a special place. The only people who can keep it that way, and also address deep-seated and potentially fatalism-breeding problems, are Virgin Islanders. Godot will not be coming anytime soon.
