EDITORIAL

Are we coming apart? (Part One)

Wednesday  April 6, 2005

While the word “paradise” applied to the Cayman Islands may have been a tourism brochure stretch, it would have been no exaggeration to say that living in this country used to be a benign experience.

Certainly there were minor ripples, but, in general — business was good, crime was negligible, government services were adequate, and there was a general sense of calm if not ease in the society. 

But, alas that picture has begun to change in the last decade as terrorism abroad shredded tourism patterns and stresses in the society at home began to surface.

In the past two years, in particular, the entropy has multiplied, and to look around at Cayman today is to echo the bewilderment of one reader that “it seems we’re coming apart.”

Undoubtedly, the invasion from Hurricane Ivan is an important contributor to the shift, but that is only part of the story.

“Coming apart” may be putting the case a little too strongly, but everywhere one looks these days there are signs of decay – none more so than the shocking events of last week.

On the political front, prior to the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly, fractiousness has risen in both intensity and frequency among our elected officials, and behaviour within the establishment has produced rumours of questionable contracts and undisputed evidence of arrogance if not autocracy.

Fundamental checks-and-balances constraints seem to be routinely ignored or circumvented, and some irregularities are now being officially identified and made public.

At the ministerial level, there are troubling defects in the system to prepare young people for the workplace, and the health services of the country seem to be going through more travail after Hurricane Ivan than it did before the storm as the number of staff resignations grows.

Housing shortages continue, and seven months after the hurricane it seems that garbage on roadsides and blue plastic on roofs have become an apparently accepted part of the Cayman landscape.

Service functions, public and private, have degenerated and either our roadways can’t cope or our driving habits have worsened, leading to traffic congestion on a scale that used to be other people’s problem – now it’s ours.

On the economic front, cruise ship activity, important as it is, is not going to generate the dollars that we’ve become accustomed to, and the slow return of our stay-over facilities suggests it will be a long time before the goose becomes golden again.

The Royal Cayman Islands Police Service, (RCIPS) is clearly undermanned, under-funded and under-equipped, and the morale among our dedicated officers, tremulous in the past, appears to be the lowest now it has ever been. This situation has now been compounded by the recent spate of drug related shootings which placed the RCIPS under even greater pressure. The face of crime is much more noticeable here, that we are now enduring the shock of gunfire in our public hospital, and the loss of yet more life to violence. We must hope that this latest incident was an aberration. It is chilling to contemplate that we may have become a country where so many youngsters are adrift from their parents and see violence as a solution to differences.

Our society that was once proud of its place at the top of the Caribbean scale is now seeing some difficult times. For those who knew that earlier Cayman, it must be a wrench to have to admit that our country, and particularly Grand Cayman, is just not the place it used to be.

It is not heartening to hear the pessimists among us contend that we are on a continuum and that there is worse to come.

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