For the first time on the East Coast, there is a chill in the air that says that it’s really fall. It was a tough summer. It seemed like it was over 90 degrees just about every day. One day after a meeting, the temperature in my car was 130 degrees.
And it wasn’t just the weather that was foul. Despite the fact that the recession had officially been declared over, the reality was that very few people felt better. The idea that we are in for a very long stretch of mass joblessness, and that we are a poorer country than we were before this downturn, is just beginning to sink in.
The political climate is also unremittingly ugly. People with good sense avoid watching the news, especially the cable talk shows. The emptiness of the political discussion and debates running up to the November elections is pretty depressing, with everyone in full attack mode.
“Call Senator Blowhard and tell him to stop destroying our grandchildren’s future.”
“Why won’t Congressman Smith tell us whether he had sex with a goat?”
In New York, the Republican candidate for governor threatened to “take out” a reporter who asked a question he didn’t like.
It is very difficult to have a reasoned discussion, and the notion that someone can have a different view of things and not be either evil or a moron is mostly lost. It’s pretty grim. “Toxic” is a word that comes up a lot, and it is an accurate description of the social and political environment in our country.
In a weird way, it has been kind of refreshing to see the V.I. candidates for governor continue to make wild and totally unfulfillable promises, just as they always have in the past. It is probably not a good thing that these candidates seemed to have not read a newspaper in the last few years, and that they are willing to say things that are totally disconnected from reality. But, unlike the attack ads, at least we know that nobody will believe this nonsense.
Meanwhile, when I did my daily world weather check, it seemed to be raining in St. Thomas every day. I began to think that it was a trick, that the weather people had gotten lazy, and they were putting the same numbers in the paper each day.
Rather than worrying about economic collapse, I began to fear that all of the rain might be turning Virgin Islanders into prune people. One thing seemed certain: when the plane landed in St. Thomas, the mountain and the UVI campus were not going to be brown.
Where are all of these bad things—bad weather, bad economic news and bad politics—leading us? Predicting the future is always a foolish game, but it does seem that, in important ways, the territory and mainland America are moving in different directions and interpreting reality in different ways. In certain ways, this has always been the case, but it feels more true today.
Something else struck me as I thought about what the past can tell us about the future. We all think that wherever we are must be the center of the universe simply because we are there. The U.S. Virgin Islands is a small place, three islands with a population that is about the same as my neighborhood in New York City.
In New York, people don’t think they are the center of the universe, they know it. And some of them, like our friends on Wall Street, actually believe that they are running it.
Here is what I began thinking about the territory. Looking back over the last several decades, I believe that the U.S. Virgin Islands, small as it is, could have been a model, or at least a laboratory, in three critical areas of our national life: living in a diverse society, managing an economy with a large public sector and living in harmony with nature.
Each of these is something that humans in general have not done very well. And, in each of these areas, Virgin Islanders had – and possibly still have – an opportunity to make something different and better.
In the next three installments, I will look at each of these areas: living together, government as the economic driver and living in harmony with nature.
