On Discipline

Almost a month ago, a group of Chinese acrobats came to Nassau and performed for Bahamian audiences. There were sixteen of them. Their average age was twelve; and they held their Bahamian audiences spellbound with their feats.

One night — the last night of the run, as is typical of performances in Nassau — the side of the Kendal G. L. Isaacs Gym towards which the acrobats were performing was filled to capacity; there was standing room only, unless we wanted to open up the performance and turn the stage around, and seat people on the opposite side of the gymnasium. The acrobats performed, earning their "oohs" and "aahs". They were not alone; two Bahamian martial arts schools performed as well. In each case the performers demonstrated a level of discipline that was both remarkable and admirable.

But the Bahamian audience did not.

To begin with, people arrived late. Not just a little late — five or ten minutes, the kind of late that can be excused by traffic or some other everyday occurrence — but very late, the kind of late that lecturers at COB mark "absent". The show started a little after seven (it was delayed by the number of people in the audience and by the fact that a lot of people were a little late); the real latecomers appeared between seven-thirty and eight o'clock.

To continue, people left early. Bahamian crowds have this apparent need to "beat the traffic". You see it on airplanes, at the movies, and worst of all, in live performance; large numbers of people stand before the end has quite arrived, in the hopes that they will be the first to the door, and therefore the first out the gate and onto the road. Their hopes are almost always vain, of course; only one person can be the first, and that honour generally goes to the person sitting near to the door. But apparently that fact hasn't killed the desire.

And to finish, people found it very difficult to sit in their seats. I'm not talking just about the parents of very young children who had to get up and take them to the bathroom. I'm talking about adults, teenagers, anyone who took it into their heads to stretch their legs during the excessively lengthy 70-minute performance. And every time people felt the urge to move around, they wandered between the invited guests (visiting dignitaries from China who had come to see their very own people perform) and the performance.

I was left uncomfortably aware of the discipline displayed by the twelve-year-old visiting Chinese acrobats, and the lack of discipline displayed by too many of us.

Now before anyone takes offence, let me say that I have been observing this phenomenon for a quite a long time. Most of the time it amuses me. You see, I am not one of those people who believe that it is physically impossible for a Bahamian to arrive anywhere, or to start anything on time; on the contrary, I believe that it is a matter of choice, a matter of planning. We choose to be indisciplined. We choose to be late.

If you doubt me on this, just attend any funeral. The number of people sitting in their seats a good hour or so before the service is slated to start is an excellent example of the fact that when we wish to arrive somewhere on time, we do so. And count the number of times the pastor or priest starts the church service late; the answer is almost never. School bells ring on time, and most teachers are in the schoolyard long before they have to be. Nurses and policemen and other people who work according to shifts are scrupulous timekeepers. Anyone who exercises early in the morning knows that Bahamians are not late risers; the bustle on the roads at dawn is evidence of that.

No; what I witnessed in the gym a month ago is not a failure of anything but a strong sense of self, an inability to recognize that just because one feels a certain way, one doesn't have to give in to that feeling. Just because one wants to get up and walk around during a performance it doesn't mean that one has to do so; one can use the bathroom before one absolutely has to, just as they taught us in school; one can plan ahead and get where one is going on time. All it takes is a little discipline.

You see, discipline is the practice of training our bodies to do what our minds tell them to do, rather than allowing our minds to be led by our bodies. The fact that we have all too often failed to do this is evidenced by the fact that when we Bahamians express our opinions, we normally do so by saying "I feel" rather than "I think" — a sure sign that we are led by our emotions and not our brains. Those of us who work at being Christians know that we can train ourselves to control our feelings with thought and prayer and practice. Anthropologically speaking, there is virtually nothing that we cannot control with our minds, a few major physical limitations aside (such as the fact that if we jump off a bridge we will fall, not fly). Theologically speaking, with God all things are possible.

The acrobats who visited the Bahamas from China were living proof that human beings, no matter how young, can train themselves and their bodies to behave in ways that are not normally possible. A twelve-year old can train himself to balance on a board placed on four cylinders stacked on a desk. Showing respect for performers and other audience members by remaining in our seats, keeping our mouths shut and our phones turned off, and ensuring that we get to functions on time seems small potatoes to me.

Of course, the respect must go both ways. Indiscipline breeds indiscipline; there is no good reason why a person should get to a performance on time if the performers themselves are going to start the show half an hour late. It's so common, in fact, for functions to begin late that during the run of The Landlord, people routinely arrived at 8:45 and 9:00 for a play whose lights went up at 8:30. One of these people, a woman, was shocked and insulted when she was told she was late at 8:50 p.m.

"The show start eight thirty, right?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," said the front-of-house attendant, "and it's almost nine."

She swelled with outrage. "But what yall doing starting on time?"

It's all a matter of discipline.

On Slavery

Well, there's a dirty word for you. Slavery — something that we would like to forget, or to deny, or to lock down in our history books and sanitize forever. We really don't like to talk about it. At all.

But we need to talk about it. Because even though it was abolished in 1834, it reminds alive and well today. And if we think we've left it behind, we've got to think again.

Now let me make something clear. This is not going to be a diatribe about race and racism. We have been raised to think of slavery as something that has to do with black people — Jemimas and Toms — all working on a plantation for a master, subjected to his whims and fancies, never free to go anywhere without his leave or direction. Now this form of slavery did indeed exist, and was most insidious. The enslavement and the dehumanization of people based on physical appearance and geographical origin was probably the most disruptive method of slavery, and the most complete; whole societies were built upon the social and economic structure of the slave plantation, and the legacy of that error remains with us today, among the descendents of both the masters and the slaves. But what I am going to talk about today is something a lot less easy to categorize, and therefore much harder to fix.

You see, the slavery that existed on plantations in the Americas is not the only form of slavery that there is. Nor, ironically, is it necessarily the most destructive. Slavery is the owning of a person by someone else, to the extent that nothing the slave owns is his or her own; but slavery does not always involve the physical brutalizing of another human being. It is possible for a slave to be spiritually free; and it is equally possible for a "free" man to have enslaved his mind.

I once had occasion to interview an artist who told me that Bahamians were never slaves. When our bodies were enslaved, our minds were free, and we created Junkanoo as proof of that abiding freedom. Junkanoo is the product of a free spirit, of an unshackled mind. And he was right; students of Bahamian history will realize that although Bahamians of all backgrounds struggled with poverty and lack of education throughout most of the past, the one thing we had was our independence — not our political independence, perhaps, but our independence of spirit. We believed in ourselves, because we knew we could survive in any circumstance. We ourselves were living proof; every day we wrested food from the land and sea around us, and we did not die.

We were indeed never slaves — then. But now?

I'm going to argue that although slavery ended officially in the British Caribbean 170 years ago next August, in 2003 we Bahamians are as much enslaved as were our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. And the worst thing about this is that we have enslaved ourselves.

I heard a story recently about the Abaco citrus farmers who packaged their oranges and shipped them to Nassau. The oranges sat in the food stores and rotted; no one bought them, despite the fact that they were home-grown, and the price was lower than the imported ones. So the citrus farmers exported their oranges to Florida, where Sunkist placed little stickers on each one and re-exported them to Nassau. People bought them then.

Then there's the story about the Bahamian filmmaker who applied to various agencies and government departments for assistance in making a Bahamian feature film, which would use local crews and talent in crucial positions and might offer them all a chance of doing what they loved for pay. No one took him on; no one gave him the time of day, and he was faced with the choice of letting his dream die, of moving to the USA, or of making the project with no help at all. While all of this was going on, the same government agencies opened their arms to international filmmakers who wanted to use Bahamas as a location, and allowed them access to the country and its citizens without setting basic criteria for the hiring and payment of Bahamians on the set.

And then there's the story about the VIP who was given the best parking spaces, the softest seats, the largest meals, and the most obsequious behaviour possible, but who was never told to his face when he made a mistake. Other people spent all their time smiling at him, kowtowing to him, and worshipping him while he was looking; but the minute he turned his head he was ridiculed, criticized, and hated.

All these are slave stories. All these stories speak of people who have sold themselves into captivity, who believe that other people — Americans, other foreigners, people elected to lead — are better than the ordinary Bahamian. All these stories speak of people who have given up their integrity and dignity for apparent material gain, whether it be oranges from "America", American film dollars or connections with the rich and powerful. But in each case the gain is illusory. We pay more for oranges we could've bought directly from the growers; we prostitute ourselves to be abused and disrespected; we create a class of servants and a class of masters where there is no need for either. We no longer have to be slaves, but we have chosen to behave as slaves anyway. Our plantations are not tracts of land on remote islands; they are hotels, churches and government ministries, and our masters are ourselves.

Here's a newsflash. Slavery ended 170 years ago. Surely by now it's time for us to do what the late great Robert Nesta Marley told his Jamaican fellows thirty-odd years ago: to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, and to recognize that none but ourselves can free our minds.

On Mediocrity

When I was a high school teacher, the thing that shocked me more than anything wasn't the rudeness of the students, the wildness of their lifestyles, or the paycheck, or anything that people suggested would shock me. What really shocked me was the fact that I taught students — bright, articulate students — whose aim in school was to pass. All they wanted was a 50% for their work, nothing more. They seemed to be quite satisfied with that.

In fact, the most frustrating question I've heard as an educator is: "Why you give me this D?" — as though grades were things I picked out of the sky. My answer — the answer of most lecturers who "give" Ds —was always: "I didn't give it; you earned it all by yourself." My question is: if students don't want Ds, why do so many of them work so hard to attain them?

So hard? you ask. Consider this. Many of the students who achieve Ds and complain about them are bright students who come to class when they feel like it, skip assignments at will, and neglect to do the necessary reading. In short, they are gifted individuals who don't do believe they need to do the work that is necessary to succeed. They expect success to be given to them for some other reason — perhaps how cute they look in their low-slung jeans, or how much money they have behind them, or the simple fact that they are Bahamians living in the Bahamas, and someone owes them something for that fact.

It's quite a shock to them when they begin to earn the poor grades they have worked for. Too many of them have been rewarded in the past for just those things. Too few of them have been trained to aim for excellence; rather, they have already acquired the habit of settling for mediocrity.

I'm afraid that far too often, mediocrity is a Bahamian talent.

Far too often, we adhere to the principle of not doing a full job when half of one will do; and far too often we do not challenge the people who did half of the job. We fork over our money, our votes, our thanks, and go off and mutter (or shout) well out of earshot.

And this concerns me.

It's not just that I don't like mediocrity very much. Nor is it that we're fast hurtling towards a world in which we will be measured by international standards of excellence, not by those easy-to-lower bars we set for ourselves, and we are not preparing ourselves to compete at that level. It concerns me because our easy acceptance — our elevation — of the mediocre tells me that we don't like ourselves very much.

We don't like one another enough to give one another the best that we can. And we don't like ourselves enough to discover what our best is.

Sometimes we settle for mediocrity because we're lazy; we can't be bothered to do the best job possible. Sometimes we settle for it because we've procrastinated so much that it's impossible to do the job well in the time we have left, and so we just aim to get it done. Sometimes we settle for it because we trust in God, and somehow it's always all right on the night (even when it's not). And sometimes we settle for mediocrity because, after all the other times we've settled, we just don't know what excellence is anymore.

But it doesn't really matter. Settling for the mediocre just isn't good enough. Never mind that free trade is coming and we are going to have to compete with people who do know excellence when they pass it in the street. Every time we settle for less than our best we lower not just the standards for ourselves, but for our children. And in doing so, we make it all the more difficult for them to succeed.

Let's go back to the students I mentioned to begin with. In almost every case, it was the students who were bright or very bright who were just getting by. The best of our young people are the ones who are settling for the mediocre, and part of the reason for this is that they have not been taught to aim as high for very much. In a society where all that matters is getting over — collecting the top grade with a minimum of effort, keeping the job no matter how poorly we perform it, getting whatever it is we want without ever having to struggle for it, far too many of the best of us never learn how good we can really be, because we never push ourselves far enough to find out.

No wonder we have a problem in this country with self-esteem!

Our cult of mediocrity has made us a people who don’t expect much of ourselves, who take poor service and worse attitudes for granted, and who reward the mediocre with accolades. There's an up side to all of this: the less we expect, the less we have to achieve to look good. But there's a down side as well. We may be comfortable with what we deliver. But when we compare what we do with what others do we realize how inferior our product is.

In a world where racism is the order of the day, where it is fundamentally engrained into every one of us who can read or watch television that black people can't and white people can, this cult of mediocrity simply serves to reinforce all the stereotypes. And the fact that we accept it, the fact that we let it pass without remarking on it or embarking on a campaign to effect a change, tells me that, deep down, we just don't value ourselves enough to do our best. We don't value ourselves as Bahamians, and we don't value ourselves as humans. All that we are worth is written on our paychecks or our transcripts.

It is time, I believe, for us to return to the fundamental truths that build human beings: that what we do matters far less than the way we do it, and that the way we do our work tells the world who we think we are. It is time we abandoned our false god of mediocrity and worshipped at the altar of excellence. It is time we took risks, time we pushed ourselves far enough to fail. It is only by failing, by getting up and by learning how not to fail the next time that we ever learn truly to respect ourselves.