One people, no direction

If you didn’t see the KSPN news on Tuesday, then you missed a very important phenomenon I have talked about for years finally being put to the test. I recently wrote a letter to the editor about the need for us to create a consensus and stance on federalization for our new Delegate to represent in Washington. The news report clearly showed our new delegate “begging” our leaders to come together and form a consensus but it was all for nothing. Members of the Legislature even went as far as to say “there was no unified position.” I knew our new delegate would face the challenge of representing a divided people and a divided government and it didn’t even take a week for it to become a reality.

The CNMI has literally been floating along with the current when it comes to our quality of life, the economy, and change. Many of the things we have accomplished along the way in these areas were more of happenstance than planned development. We elected a new leader and three years later we still haven’t created a consensus and determined the direction in which we need to sail. In fact, we are headed back to where we started. Our politics are directly related to our economic conditions and I just wonder how long will we continue to allow our leadership to just float along with the current? When will our Legislature learn that partisan politics during times like these can be deadly to political careers because it places undue hardship on the people? The coconut wire is already sending the message to get rid of almost everyone in the present Legislature and the Executive Office because they can’t unite themselves or the people they are supposed to be leading. Everybody knows we are going nowhere fast! John Gonzales and his youth movement may indeed be our best hope in the not too distant future.

Synergy is the intangible force that has the ability to overcome almost any obstacle, be it physical, social, political or economic challenge. We haven’t had real synergy in the CNMI since the “united” decision to develop the garment and tourist industries and that synergy has sustained us until the end of the WTO. We are now literally out of gas and have come to a standstill, just floating in the water. The pleas I made to stop the junkets and identify new potential industries first are now coming back to haunt us. The pleas I made for us to become one people are now coming back to haunt us. The many pleas from the feds for us to raise wages and more recently to unite on the federalization issue are now coming back to haunt us. Now our own Delegate to Congress is begging us to unite and form a consensus on what the CNMI intentions are or there is very little he can do for us in Washington. It is very clear to me that our representatives as a whole on the Hill are not listening or they really don’t know what or how to build the consensus and create the synergy we need to head in a new direction.

But let’s face it, some of our people in the Legislature and in the Executive Office are from the old school of fighting change and protecting the status quo when it’s clear that a new school of change and experimentation is on the horizon. They may never have the capacity to deal with challenges in these modern times and they can do us a favor by not running again. Times have changed too fast for some of them to ever catch up mentally and it explains why we haven’t caught up in education, socially and economically with our counterparts on the mainland. The scary part is that our best and brightest are leaving the CNMI or are being chased away by our government’s failure to set the conditions for their employment in the CNMI. Mr. Pierce is right about those leaving and maybe the next set of legislators will get it, that they must change or we won’t be going anywhere until they realize that we must be one people headed in the same direction.