Halo! Everbody home?

When simple folks express heart-felt sentiments about hardship at home meeting family financial obligations you know that a lot has gone wrong in paradise. It’s a voice you can’t ignore for it came from the depth of their soul. It was painful listening to their lumpy or quivering voices.

Fifteen long years of “do-nothing” turns family income into zero. In other words, there’s no improvement in salaries throughout the same period.

Yet families had to deal with paying the first family home, automobile, real estate and auto insurance, health and life insurance, basic goods prices of which have gone up considerably, among others. Imagine juggling which loan to pay on a given payday Friday. This decision means paying for late charges. There’s no option for families up this alley.

You keep your ears to the ground in hopes that someone had the brilliance and confidence to move family income forward. But senators gave themselves $2,500 per month to deal with cost of living expenses. The fiscal virus is likely to hit the lower chamber soon.

Senators really had the gall to overlook the needs of the people they represent while bagging $2,500 per month in additional income. They decided to denigrate and relegate the livelihood of their people into soft kill and wipe out by driving them into the lowest corner of poverty.

The grand insensitivity makes you wonder if they haven’t been inoculated with nepenthe, a drug that causes forgetfulness as to completely ignore people they represent. Call it apathy and greed that feeds only their pockets.

No wonder the simple folks are angry and justifiably so! Have their constituents turned into bloodless robotics? It is also rumored that other expenses are paid for via vouchers from their rich friends. Our vouchers are in the bankbooks we struggle to pay monthly.

Though explained in layman’s term, their expressions deal with economic depression that translates into vicious familial hardship. This has been and continues to be the toxic legacy of republicans now in office. Villagers know this can’t go on for another 15 years. Something just doesn’t add up. To expect family income improving is basically dead!

It’s hard walking the path of poverty with hopelessness and uncertainty piled atop our aspiration to see better days ahead. I’m not sure Da Boys could silence the mounting discontentment in the villages. It grows louder by the day!

Dazed Bunch: Pile this view atop a dazed group on the hill and you begin to see and understand the troubled and dissonant voices of our people in the villages.

There’s no leadership. It created a vacuum of suspicion from all over the archipelago. Imagine reminding the imperial bunch to employ the concept of “servant leadership” where the focus is service to others over the self. I look back at history and the concept used to be the foundation of representation here. It is no longer! Uncertainty has fomented fear all over.

The economic dystopia—where nothing works—is internally inflicted. It comes from the lack of leadership who equally ignored putting forth a thoughtful plan to guide growth and development here. The vacuum created “affluenza” where the elected elite trashed the future of the indigenous people in favor of their rich donors. This is despicably outrageous!

I’ve even gone back cultural soul-searching if it isn’t part of our way of life looking out for the wellbeing of others in our community. I thought care and compassion are embedded in the fabric of our culture. We also openly use communal sharing to help our very own from sinking deeper into the abyss of abject poverty. Why have the elitist bunch abandoned our people?

I think we’ve reached the end of a forked road where we must now decide to recapture what’s ours as indigenous people. It’s about navigating our future against becoming slaves of the new affluenza and filthy sugar daddies!

Imagine shaking off mañana
Through the years we’ve seen changes from subsistence living to government jobs and the local view that a public sector job is success; private sector jobs, failure.

I’ve probed for the measurement of this superficial definition to no avail. It’s a bothersome view where we ignore the productive in favor of the non-productive sector of our community.

It led to the belief of “everything is government”. Yes, I understand the role of government in the conduct of local affairs. But it has also built a bloated public sector that remains the largest employer today. This is very unhealthy! Why would anyone force taxpayers to pay for the negligence and excess of public officials who are clueless of runaway expenditure at our expense?

I fail to see why allow fiduciary failure to go on. So some have seen useless political jobs as the golden parachute for survival. It discourages training (skills acquisition) and education. It feeds upon bosses who run a corrupt system, army of precinct and patronage workers, the smalltime grafters and all the favor seekers and dispensers. Why capitalize on the ignorance of people you’ve forced to fail for the rest of their lives? Don’t you have any sense of justice about their future?

The disdain we have on the productive sector of the economy needs to change if we’re to move forward in stride reining-in investments and new sources of revenue. It’s private industries that turn in a profit not the government!

It’s a matter of policy focus, isn’t it? When do we begin?