New York City’s population is about 80 times larger than that of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The differences in scale are pretty big, so most comparisons don’t work. But here is one that might work. There are different ways of thinking about problems and opportunities and solutions.
In New York, those who make things happen think big and act big. Much of this, but not all, is driven by greed and competitiveness. (By way of contrast, in my hometown, Milwaukee, people tend to think small and then delay any action while an idea is picked apart by the forces of negativity.) So, when terrorists knocked down the World Trade Center towers, a decision was made to build something even bigger and better. We’ll show “them” (and make a few hundred million dollars in the process) was the theme.
There was lots of squabbling and delays but, in the end, something big and impressive is emerging. Many have forgotten, or never knew, that Battery Park City, population about 8,000, in Lower Manhattan was built on the landfill from the original World Trade Center, and that it used to be the Hudson River. They think big here – and long-term. This is especially true if there is private gain and public prestige at stake. The list of names on major buildings in New York now constitutes a rogues gallery of some of the worst people in the world.
Whether these big things do any good or serve any useful purpose is a whole other matter. Some do; some don’t. For example, there is something new on the Manhattan skyline. It is a number of slender, rising towers, some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. They are the future homes, to the extent that these people have “homes,” of the richest people on earth. Hedge fund guys, Russian oligarchs, Arabian princes, South American swindlers, etc.
All of these places are going up in Manhattan and they are big. So when you live on the 80th floor and have paid $95 million for your condo (no exaggeration), you probably won’t have to think too much about the 50,000 people living in the City’s homeless shelters every night or the thousands of others living on the streets and under bridges. As I said, big is not always of any real social value.
New York is also starting to think big about something else, a very big issue that requires big thinking: climate change. New York City is not the first place that pops into your mind when you ponder nature. In Manhattan, except for Central Park, an occasional glimpse of the sky, and the fact that night follows day, you kind of forgot that there was nature.
Not anymore. Superstorm Sandy changed that. Mayor Bloomberg has just proposed a $20 billion long-term plan to prepare the city for the superstorms of the future, rising sea levels and the other impacts of climate change. This plan is almost certain to change when we get a new mayor next year, and, depending on our economic fortunes, it may either grow or shrink. But it is a big plan with big ideas to address a big problem. We are facing reality. Devastation will do that for you.
It has always been hard to find big ideas or big initiatives in the Virgin Islands. And I don’t think that the fact that it is a small place is the reason. There are big problems that will need big solutions. Climate change and the state of primary and secondary education, along with violence, immediately come to mind.
The territory needs long-term plans – and the ability to execute them – to mitigate the impacts of climate change, to dramatically improve the quality of education and to reverse a trend in violence that threatens the economy and the stability of civil society. Three big things.
Historically the pattern in the territory, as elsewhere, when faced with big challenges includes the following: big talk, sloganeering and posturing, followed by a lack of follow-through and, because there has been no real follow-through, the pumping up of small symbolic efforts. None of these address the scale of the problem, and things continue to deteriorate. After many months of gestation, the elephant gives birth to a hamster. To save face, the parents claim that the hamster is really a tiny elephant who enjoys running around in a wheel.
The territory’s school problem is the most pressing, partly because it is the most visible and does the most immediate damage. Unlike climate change, the results are already in, and they are catastrophic. Children’s futures have been sacrificed to a range of other needs and to the demands of entrenched interests. “Reforms” have amounted to tinkering around the edges, or the reformers have been driven from the territory before they had a chance to do anything.
This is a big problem and, in this case, “long-term” means the sacrifice of the futures of more children. There is a need to think big and move quickly. Doing something substantive will require that leaders and decision-makers take unpopular stands, fire people who don’t do their jobs in what seems certain to be large numbers, find money for good educational programs in a down economy and hold educational leaders accountable for reasonable results.
What is at stake? The future of the territory, nothing more, nothing less. The starting point is to clearly describe the consequences of the status quo, to force its defenders into the open, to define a vision for a better future, and to find the people who can execute and achieve that vision. Big and daunting challenge, right? It is big because it matches the scale of the problem.
