Tony’s battle cry

Ya gotta give Tony Pellegrino credit. The guy is a bona fide optimist and can-do guy, tireless in his enthusiasm and genuinely concerned and worried about the future of the islands, especially the young people. Every other week we see a well thought out, articulate column that is meant to be a positive approach to solving the islands’ economic problems. I always agree with Tony and his analogies and down-to-earth words of wisdom ring true to life, no matter where you live or what your culture or creed is.

On one hand I want to say keep those letters coming Tony, the collective subconscious of society needs to constantly repetitively hear this positive self-talk in order to slowly start reprogramming itself. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Keep up the good work, someone has to and your words will eventually ignite the fire in the belly of one young person who’ll see the light. A light long dimmed and shut off in their parents’ ignorant eyes.

One the other hand, I want to say, Tony, dude, wake up! You can’t fix stupid. Unfortunately some things in life are simply broken and can’t be fixed, that’s it. Broken and done. Your sage words and Norman Vincent Peale power of positive thinking just won’t work on these people. They don’t get it and probably never will.

I remember living up the road from a family that was, to say it politely…KooKoo. The family drank from dawn to dusk, piled garbage in their front lawn and never worked. The father was collecting a check from one of garment factories but never worked a day, the whole family was living on food stamps, nobody worked, and the eldest boy was an insane ice addict. This was the family from hell to have as a neighbor. One day the eldest daughter I guess broke up with the husband, or whatever, and kicked him out of their little side house on the property. She then proceeded to burn the house down. As the house burnt behind her, she propped up her barbecue and started cooking in front of the burning house, had a Bud, and went about her business seemingly with no care of the fire in her backyard. This seems to be metaphoric of what’s happening to a sadly high percentage of the local population. Their world is burning to the ground behind them but they’re happy to barbecue.

Tony, the people who need to hear your words most are also the ones not capable socially of understanding what you’re trying to say. They’re broken and unable to change the model of the universe they have been born into and have been accustomed to for all their lives. You can’t change their nature. Do I really believe this? To some degree, unfortunately yes. Should Tony stop wasting his time writing pleas and stories of the “little engine that could” to people who couldn’t care about anything except their free government handouts? I don’t know…I really don’t know…