By A. Steve McField

Our fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers and husbands lost their best seamen positions on the merchant ships and the super tankers because the shipping magnates replaced them with other seamen with lesser ability for a cheaper wage. But, little did the Caymanian fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and husbands know that they would suffer a similar fate in their own homeland with social and destructive consequences. With no ship on which to prove their worth, they would be overboard out of the lifeboat.

We have spent millions and millions of dollars to engage studies and reports about some of the most obvious subjects that we already know what the pros and cons are, including the parrots. We know that the parrots are destroying the farms’ fruits. Yet, we have not spent any money or meaningful time on engaging into the inquiry of what has been happening to our society since our seamen fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers and husbands became left ashore.

I believe that many of our social and deviant behaviour patterns exhibited by our young people over the past two decades to the present time are directly related to the place in this society in which those who once were accepted as the best seamen have now been relegated to mere “boys”.

Anyone that studied and examined societal changes should recognise what has happened here from the mid-sixties to today. The mid-sixties was a time that included those Caymanian seamen, the victims of cheaper replacements. After they were thrown ashore some of them became labourers employed on the building of the edifices to facilitate the passage of money through this country. Few of them became contractors. None of them were re-trained to become fund managers or money managers.

The Cayman Islands experienced the great boom between the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties when the building boom began to even off. The men and the women arrived to sit in the boardrooms, to take up residence and to count money and to set their price for their professional services. The Caymanian seamen were not regarded as professionals, according to those new arrivals.

Caymanian seamen were not entitled to any professional fees, as their labour and skills that they had acquired whilst working on the merchant ships and super tankers were not needed. Many of them were relegated to driving taxis. Others, who could afford a boat, took tourists out on the sea. Others, many others, had no place to find stature but the bars. By this time their labour and their skills were no longer relevant. Employers could now get labour and skills from outside for a cheaper wage.

Between the mid-nineties and today the Caymanian seamen and their sons and grandsons too became almost redundant, except for a select few. Only those persons who were deemed to be safe and cooperative, with no desire for competition would be given the opportunity to get an entry level education and a corresponding position.

Caymanian men, great men, tried and proven, became mere onlookers as other men became wealthy, socially prominent and politically powerful before their eyes. Some Caymanian women fared a little better than their fathers, brothers, uncles or husbands. Some of them could still find the clerical positions. A few of them were even elevated to the not-so-powerful managerial positions. They could find jobs working in some of the hotels, condos and restaurants. None, or not many of them were given management or head chef positions.

Many of the Caymanian seamen, their sons, grandsons, and now it seems their daughters and granddaughters, are seeking solace in the bars and the clubs often owned by non-Caymanians and are served often by non-Caymanian service workers.

Meanwhile, the Caymanian children who manage to stay in school and who manage to survive the ravages of the destructive hood culture are constantly told that if they go on and get a good education, especially a good education from a foreign institutions, they will succeed past the entry level positions. Unfortunately for them, when they equip themselves with that local and foreign education and present themselves, they are told that they cannot get the jobs because they have no experience. Meanwhile, the job positions are filled and manned by others who often have no more experience than the educated Caymanians.

The results of this systemic rejection behaviour structure are resentment, lack of self- confidence that often leads to despair, lack of respect for organised societal norms and, ultimately, deviant behaviour. Those who witness this rejection process of their family or their friends or contemporaries are also affected. The domino effect of this emasculating and suppressive attitude breeds ultimate lawlessness and deviant behaviour to gain status in a peer group.

What our young people see and experience now is a world that is mostly concerned with wealth, power, social elevation and privilege. A large number of our young people are victims of dysfunctional families, where family stability and family values are eroded because many of them have been robbed of the ability to mobilise in a non-caring environment.

Many Cayman families also do not have the steadying presence of a grandmother or grandfather whose presence in the home acts as a mirror to remind the younger family members of their own mortality and values of caring for their own source of being and family history.

In so many homes today children are raised by people from other cultures who often are not equipped to deal with our cultural values that our young minds need to cultivate. Also, the country’s ordinary job market is now almost nearly serviced by cheaper foreign labour which is often detrimental for the Cayman families. They cannot compete in such a wage-depressed work force and give their children the care and education they need to be successful.

Nearly everyone speaks of our country as a successful capitalist bastion of wealth. Yet, many Caymanians in this capitalist system often have no access to capital unless they are in the selected safe few file. Here we are in a hundred percent over employment economy with some 27,000 to 28,000 people working on permission work permits but many Caymanians cannot get a job. This structural problem is endemic. It is endemic and emasculating to our young men and degrading to our young women.

One despicable thing that has resulted from all this is an expanding welfare system, financed with assistance from work permit fees. That is the structural irony that our children and grandchildren are expected to face and accept.

We have for too long allowed the means of progress and wealth to be in the hands of a few people. Capitalism is a good system but capitalism without corresponding and connective morality and justice brings disruption, unrest, and ultimately violence. We are now experiencing this lack of morality and justice in our country. However, I do believe that we are special. We seldom do what we ought to do, but we always do what we have to do.

We cannot stop progress and development but we can stop the destruction of our cultural and historical values. We can stop the violence and the mayhem. Violence and deviant behaviour have their beginnings in the urban sprawl that is proliferating and requiring increased public revenues, as government service is needed for each area left behind.

For those who believe that they are safe because they are protected by guards and gated communities; for those whose only interest in the community is the amount of money in the cash register, I implore you to stretch out your arm and to give a hand to the child of the less fortunate family. Help him or her to get the required education and then open the opportunity door, when he or she comes knocking with their qualifications. You may think that it is not your problem and wash your hands today in the proverbial act of cleaning yourself from the mess. But, you may become the statistic tomorrow.

The accumulated disappointments that he or she harbours grow into uncontrollable destructive behaviour. I have heard the saying that “we are all in this boat together”. If that nautical metaphor is true then each of us is required to take turns on the oars and with the bailer to stop the boat from sinking. Let me remind everyone that, should the boat sink, there will be losses. There will be loss of the wealth as well as the loss of the means to obtain wealth. There can be no social and economic neutrality of crewmembers in this boat.

We now need a rigorous analysis of our vessel as we sail along. We need to inject our experiences and ingenuity into our voyage. We need to take on the social and legal mechanisms to deal with our difficulties as our cargo. We need to sail on into the difficult twenty-first century with confidence, morality and justice. To cause anyone of us to be in the water without a life jacket, without being thrown a lifeline, means that we are not all in this boat together. Let us load this boat with bales of Caymanian culture, drums of democratic values, and sail on together. To simply load this boat with bags of money owned by the select few only to purchase objects, will not prevent a mutiny.

The direction in which the boat will be heading will depend on who will be the captain and who will set the course of direction. Surely, if everyone in the boat wants to grab the helm and steer it towards this or that direction the boat may come apart on the proverbial reef.