The holiday period is a time of hope and renewal. For Christians, the Christmas story is one of hope, and the New Year allows us all to make a fresh start. Hope for better times must be based in either faith or some concrete reality. Gov. Charles Turnbull's recent holiday message of "peace, joy, love, hope, and unity" was based in neither faith nor reality. Instead, it was typical of the kind of meaningless chatter that, if anything, will breed further pessimism and cynicism.
The Governor's "hope for a better tomorrow for ourselves and our children" combines pining for some nonexistent golden past with a denial of his own responsibility for doing something. It would seem reasonable to give the governor a pass because it was the holidays, or because he often appears so overwhelmed that it seems mean to criticize him. But Mr. Turnbull is the elected Governor of the Virgin Islands. He sought the job, and his holiday message is typical of his passivity and inherent pessimism about the possibility of positive change. Rather than acting as a leader, he behaves like a bystander. This mix of hand-wringing, professions of powerlessness, and constant grasping for bailouts is nothing short of a recipe for continuing and accelerating decline.
The governor and others assume that the salvation of the Virgin Islands must come from the outside, in some form of forgiveness or "bail out." After this financial windfall, life will go on as it has, that is with a government that represents increasingly narrow interests, a bloated unproductive public sector, and continued hostility to business. It isn't going to happen, and it wouldn't work even if the federal government were stupid enough to "bail out" the territory. There is nothing insoluble about the problems that the Virgin Islands faces. They are only insoluble if there is an insistence that all of the current ways of doing business must remain unchanged.
In many ways, it is unfortunate that successive V.I. governments have found ways to avoid a day of reckoning by doing things that have insured slow but steady decline. At some point, this decline becomes irreversible simply because it has gone on for so long, and people come to believe that it is irreversible. It is, however, simply not true that Virgin Islanders are powerless to solve many of their own problems. Other places have faced problems just as difficult and have overcome them.
The causes for hope do not come from bromides that appropriately come from the pulpit rather than Government House. Hope will come from giving people a clear vision of what a "new" Virgin Islands can realistically look like and the changes that will be needed to get there. Hope for the future begins with such a vision and small, visible, concrete steps that tell the community that it does, in fact, control its own destiny.
Here are two suggestions for 2001. First, develop a substantive plan for addressing the priority issues identified in the "Kids Count" Report, and then develop a similar plan for community beautification. Begin to implement those plans and, in January 2002, be able to look back on this year as one of measurable accomplishment.
In contrast to the typical inter-island trash-talking, let the three islands engage in a positive competition to see which can develop and implement the most effective plan, and, at the same time, put in place a model for community cooperation. Think of a holiday message next year that says, "we did it" and "this was just the first step." That would be a message of hope and unity.
January, 2001
Editor's note: Frank Schneiger is president of the Human Services Management Institute, a consulting firm. He has served as assistant commissioner of Health for the City of New York and founded Comprehensive Medical Management Inc. He is the author of "Cutting and Coping," a how-to guide for managing retrenchment. He has worked with V.I. agencies since 1975, most recently as consultant to United Way of St. Thomas/St. John. He is one of the founders of the St. Thomas/St. John Youth Multiservice Center.
Readers are invited to send comments on this article to source@viaccess.net.
