Many years ago I attended a drug treatment training program. At the time, “therapeutic communities” were the new magic potion that would rid the planet of drug addiction. The leader of our group stated the program’s indisputable principle: that we must at all times confront the total reality of our lives.
I raised my hand and said that, given how lousy a lot of people’s lives were, I didn’t think that was such a hot idea. For making what seemed like a harmless observation, I was summarily kicked out of the group.
Looking back, the group leader had a real point. It is important to face reality, to see the world as it really is, rather than the way we would like it to be. For Americans today, there are, at least, two big realities to be considered.
If we look back at the period since World War II, Americans, whether mainlanders or Virgin Islanders, have led charmed lives compared to most of the rest of the world. For a long time, the economy kept growing, and living standards rose year by year. The wars we fought were always on someone else’s soil. We have not suffered from hunger or famine. We have had high levels of personal freedom.
And for certain groups, white men in particular, we were part of the luckiest generation in the history of the world. There was a reason that Americans were optimistic people.
The second reality is quite different. Predicting the future is best left to the know-it-alls on cable news, but it seems very likely that we are now heading back into recession. For many people, we never came out of the one that began in 2008. The recent actions of our government, especially the deficit reduction plan, are certain to make the situation worse.
And, most important, the history of debt-fueled financial and economic crises is that they take a long time, sometimes decades, to resolve. We are in deep trouble, with no clear path out, a social safety net that has been shredded and the potential for a clean sweep by the forces of the far right in next year’s elections.
Wherever people live, they feel that they are somehow at the center of the universe. But it is crystal clear that the Virgin Islands, with its small population, is not going to be the tail that wags the dog on any of these big issues.
In the months and years ahead, its focus will have to be on avoiding becoming “collateral damage,” especially if the reactionary right expands its destructive power. A critical starting point will be to avoid inflicting damage on itself by adopting reactionary policies that are increasingly “in the American mainstream.”
A reader recently accused me of changing my tune about the V.I. government as a jobs provider. He was correct. Basic facts and the situation have changed, and I now have a different view of the future. I do not see any way in which the private sector—either on the mainland or in the territory—is going to create anywhere near enough jobs to make a big dent in our massive unemployment and underemployment. Work is vital to economic and social stability. Government will—and should—continue to be a major source or driver of employment.
Trashing public sector workers is now a core theme of the reactionary right. There aren’t many public workforces more open to legitimate criticism than that in the U.S. Virgin Islands. People do not work hard enough. They have too many holidays. They are frequently not well trained. They tend to treat their fellow citizens badly. They are often hostile to the very businesses that provide critical tax revenues. They tend to be indifferent to quality. And they do not produce results. Unions are too rigid. In other words, they are a perfect target for those who want to discredit public workers, demolish government and privatize the world.
The salvation of the territory as a viable economy and decent place to live and raise families in the decades immediately ahead will depend on flipping this list of negatives. It won’t be easy. The U.S. Virgin Islands has a particularly acute case of the French political disease: big talk and demands for revolutionary change, with only one condition: that everything stays the same, especially for me.
It didn’t work in the past, and it definitely won’t work in the future.
Seeing the world as it is
In that new world, we face deep problems, and there are big limits to what government can do to solve them, especially in the short term. Within those limits, there are things that can be done. And they are important. For the U.S. Virgin Islands, the big ones are clear to everyone who cares to look:
• Greatly improve the performance of the public sector workforce. These workers provide critical services, and citizens deserve to get their money’s worth. This area gives us another comparison to the French. France also has a big public sector, and it shows in high-quality services and the protection of the country’s natural beauty. It can work. Unfortunately, the French and Virgin Islanders share some not-so-cool attitudes toward customer service.
• Greatly improve education at all levels from pre-K through UVI. Whatever the future holds, it will be bleak for those who are uneducated. If there is a model in this area, it is Barbados.
• Eliminate the wall of government hostility to business and encourage business development by both Virgin Islanders and others. Supporting businesses does not include encouraging them not to pay their taxes as the proposal to eliminate tax clearance letters would do.
• Protect and enhance the physical environment. The territory can be a beacon of hope, possibly the only one under the American flag, if it pursues any number of green initiatives, including big ones like the regional electricity grid.
If one looks at the Republican right and the Tea Party people, the Virgin Islands, if they could find it on a map and realized that it was American, would be a target of opportunity that they would find hard to resist. A “let’s teach them a lesson” place, with a largely black population, strong unions and a large government sector that doesn’t function very well. In their view, a trifecta of everything that is wrong with the world.
It would be very advantageous to be able to say, “Yes, we have problems, and here is what we are doing to fix them. And here is why this model is better than anything you have to offer.”
Frank Schneiger
August 5, 2011
