On Nine to Five

I was sitting in traffic the other day. Sitting in traffic, by the way, is something I would prefer not to do. It's a supreme waste of time, particularly on this island which is only twenty-one miles long. And a question bubbled up to the surface of my mind. It was this. Why am I sitting in traffic?

The answer, on the face of it, was so simple one would have to be simple not to get it: Because it's a quarter to nine in the morning.

It was far too simple an answer for me, I can tell you. My mind is an unruly thing. Another question came burbling up. But why?

The answer came from Out There, wherever That might be: Because people work nine to five.

My response was: no, they don't. And I meant it.

Now, I'm not talking Sting-time here, though I could be. No; what I mean is this. People's brains don't simply turn on at nine in the morning and turn off at five. Thinking isn't something that knows the hours on the face of a clock; thoughts come when they come, and there's not a lot one can do about it. Contrary to what we've been trained to think, work — and particularly twenty-first-century work — is not best done in eight-hour blocks, with an hour in the middle for lunch.

So why do we insist that work involves reporting to a building at nine o'clock and leaving it at five?

To answer that fully, we have to have some idea of the origins of the twin concepts of labour and production, which incorporate the idea that a person can exchange what he or she does with hands or brain for money. Now, the thought that what I produce is separable from me, something I can sell at a price determined by someone else, has the kind of peculiarity that becomes greater and greater the longer you examine it, but never mind that.

Quite simply, it's an idea that became current during the industrial revolution, when the creation of factories and mass production changed the way that work was regarded. In a factory, you see, individuals are hired for the use of their hands and for their presence, and very little beyond that. Especially after the production line was invented, the only purpose for employing human beings in a factory was to make sure the machines did their jobs as they should. But in economies that rely on other kinds of production, labour is not something that you can separate from people. One carpenter is not just as good as another, nor are two masons alike; you pay for the quality of the work produced, and not for the body that produces it. Even in an agricultural society, labour is only saleable during periods in which it doesn't matter who does the work, such as harvest time; during the rest of the year, skills matter.

In short, the creation of factories created the concept of work as being something separate from the human being. Before that time, one did one's work where one found oneself; work spaces and home spaces overlapped, and workdays were determined by the projects one had to complete. On the farm, for instance, an eight-hour day means very little at all. You work till you finish what you have to do! If you finish it in four hours, good for you — and if it takes you twelve, well, there it is. Similarly, for an artisan or an artist, work is measured by the completion of a job. There's no value in sitting down from nine to five in one's workspace if it produces nothing at the end of the day.

Now this makes sense to me. Work should be measured by achievement, by what is accomplished in a sitting, not by how long one spends on the job. Thing is, our society appears to believe the myth that a job is something detachable from a person. Someone asking for "a job" is more often than not asking for a place to be sent for eight hours a day, five days a week, with a pay check coming every now and then. What that job is hardly seems to matter. If one reports on time, leaves on time, and pushes the requisite amount of paper or cement around then that pay check just keeps on a-coming.

Now this, I submit is odd. Even odder: far too many of these jobs appear to have to start at nine in the morning and end at five at night.

What I don't get is this. It's perfectly possible for a person to be present in body between nine and five and doing no work at all — and it's equally possible for a person to be in traffic, or in bed, or in the shower, and to be working harder than the person at the desk. Inspiration doesn't know hours; anyone who has been woken up at three in the morning with an idea that just won't quit knows that this nine-to-five deal is a scam, an artificial set period that make it easier for accountants and bosses to deal out the dollars, but which really has very little to do with work.

I have been a bureaucrat, a hotel worker, a writer and a teacher in my life. There's nothing magic about nine to five beyond the magic imparted by traffic jams, stress, and air pollution. I had the great fortune to have been employed in a twenty-four hour service industry at the beginning at my career, and so learned early that even working eight hours a day doesn't mean you have to work nine to five; I worked every shift my position allowed, from seven-to-three to four-to-twelve. As a teacher, I learned that being in the classroom for six hours a day is no measure whatsoever of how hard one works. People who believe that teachers have it good (they get off at three/they have long vacations) should try it. During those six hours, there is no downtime; you're lucky to get to sip some tea. Even when one leaves the classroom, one continues to work as long as one is awake, preparing, marking, thinking. And as a writer, I know that my brain does not turn off when I leave the office. Oddly enough, it seems to turn on.

The thing is this. We no longer live in the industrial age. In this country, we never did. The age of the internet erodes all boundaries. Nine to five is obsolete. Isn't it about time we recognized this fact, and gave some thought to changing the horrid nine to five?

On the Stopping of Bucks

It wasn't me.

It's not my fault.

Whatever it is, I didn't do it.

We live in a country, or in an era, or in a culture, or in something, where personal responsibility is hard to come by. Very few of us have ever done anything wrong. No. We make mistakes; none of us is perfect. When we transgress, it's always because of some external force. The road was slippery. The tree stepped out in front of us. Our finger slipped on the trigger and we miss and shoot the man. Or, we grow up poor. We didn't have the advantages you have. We don't know no better. The neighbour made us do it. The devil made us do it. God made us do it.

We live in a society in which bucks are passed around and around, where if we watch them we are liable to grow dizzy with the movement. If we listen to ourselves, we are all leaves floating in the wind, corks a-bobbing on the sea. We have no volition of our own; we are at the mercy of circumstance.

It is a rare, rare thing to find someone who will say, as American President Harry Truman once became famous for saying: the buck stops here.

No. Around here, bucks don't often stop. Nothing is ever anyone's fault. We play the politics of blame so well we have almost forgotten how to engage with issues. The result: we become so busy pointing our fingers at one another when we notice problems that we never get around to fixing any of them.

Let me begin with the freshest controversy: Junkanoo. It's January, after all. Now I shall say first off that this year has been one of the better ones with regard to blame and finger-pointing — at least so far — because to some degree there are fewer scapegoats around. This year the Junkanoos, particularly the competitors, held a lot of the responsibility for the parades. The Junkanoo Corporation of The Bahamas was given the authority to deal with the training of the judges and the tallying and the administration of the parades, and for the most part things went very well. Except. On Boxing Day, someone overlooked the biggest competitive category at all.

Now we must admire the way in which that mistake was handled. The Chairman of the Parades Management Board took full responsibility for it. It may not have been directly his fault, in that he didn't overlook the Overall Group Costume category personally, but he took responsibility for it because it was his job to be responsible for it. Applause, Ken — well done. What he didn't say, but could have, was that the overlooking was a collective thing: that it wasn't something that one person or one group messed up on, but that it was something that happened in an open room in full view of the group observers who had come in to monitor the judging and the tallying of the parade. The Chairman wasn't the only person who had the responsibility of ensuring that the right things were provided to the judges; every group who sent an observer shared in that responsibility. And it would seem to me that because not one of them noticed the error, the responsibility must be shared.

That's a concrete example, and a recent one, of how bucks get passed — and how they get stopped. We’re about to enter a two-year period of buck-passing now, and we can prepare ourselves for some spectacular examples. The general elections may not be around the corner, but they're down the road, and already bucks have begun flying around. It's always easy when one is in opposition to point at the weaknesses in the government's actions — and for the government to throw the weaknesses back at the opposition. No problem ever has an origin (beyond the actions of The Other Party) — and no problem has a real solution (beyond the deliverance of The Only Party). Buck-passing at its best.

The thing is that reality works against us all. While we're so busy passing the buck — from NJC to Ministry to JCB, or from FNM to PLP to UBP, or from little man to big man to the Devil/God — problems are multiplying. When no one is responsible, everything crumbles.

There is a branch of mathematics and physics that argues that no action that is independent, that even the smallest activity has repercussions elsewhere in the world. It's called chaos theory, and it demonstrates that the flap of a butterfly's wing in the Amazon can create tornadoes in the mid-western USA. According to this theory, the most careless, harmless action can have massive results far away. Of course, (and as usual), the scientists are arriving late at a point that theologians have known forever — since Cain, if we go in for the Old Testament. We are our brothers' keepers; we are all responsible for what happens around us. To pass the buck is not to duck responsibility at all; it's to ensure that nothing ever changes, nothing ever improves.

Of course, it's not our fault — is it? We exist on the borders of the United States of America, after all. And they had this culture long before us.

We can't help it, right?

Wrong. As soon as we shoulder the responsibility we all bear for the society in which we live, as soon as we accept the buck, we can help it — and we will.

On New Tings

Bahamians, it's said, love new tings.

To some degree, that's true. Just let a new restaurant open up. You better hope they got valet parking, because without it you'll never get near the place. You better eat before you go, because you won't get a table until well into the digestive process, and your stomach will start in on itself. And you better find out if they take reservations, because without them you may have to wait a week or two to even smell the door.

Or just let a new car come on the market. Even better, let it be a big car, expensive, preferably with some gold on it somewhere — on the logo, maybe, or where lesser makers would put chrome. And then watch the roads, and count to see how many of them appear within the next month or so.

Or just let a new service be provided for (say) a cell phone — or even let a new cell phone hit these shores. You'd be surprised (maybe you wouldn't) how many people invest in it.

Or just let a new place of worship open its doors. Better yet, let that place of worship come complete with a new building or even a new style of service, and watch to see how full that place will become within a week or two of its establishment.

But just don't mess with our overall way of life.

I've got a couple of things in mind here, and most of them have to do with my ministry — two in particular. The first is National Youth Service. And the second is Junkanoo.

You see, the idea of National Youth Service, which comes onstream at last this year, this month, has been kicking around for longer than many of us have been alive. (I use that "us" advisedly, by the way; I'm a little older than the idea, but only just.) It was first advanced by the brand-new Progressive Liberal Party shortly after they came to power, and discussions intensified about it right after Independence. Nothing happened back then, because the idea was too foreign, too new, and the populace resisted so strongly that the government dropped the idea. It resurfaced back at the end of the 1980s, when it became apparent that the so-called drug scourge had affected a whole generation of young Bahamians, many of them men; but once again the electorate struck back. No service for my good child, was the refrain. (Some people read that as no mixing — of classes, of races, didn't matter, but never mind that now.) And so it is that almost forty years after the idea was first introduced, National Youth Service is finally becoming a reality.

Now some may argue that the reason it hasn't happened before is that the time was not right, or that the pitch wasn't right, or that — well, something wasn't right. I'm not so sure that those reasons aren't correct, but I'm not so sure that they are, either. I'm not so sure that it matters. What matters is that we did not like this new ting. And so we fought back against people of greater foresight and vision until it became absolutely clear to many of us that this was something we had to do, or else.

And then there's Junkanoo. Well, there've been plenty of new tings happening in that festival lately, from the introduction of $75 dollar tickets to the institution of a new management structure. It's not entirely clear that Bahamians are overwhelmed with these changes. While some people flock to the best seats, many others — many of them relatives of the very people rushing in the streets — can't afford a good spot, and are excluded from full enjoyment of the achievements of their loved ones. And while the new management structure seems to have made the group leaders happier by raising the level of trust between the people operating the parades and the people competing in them, from the outside — or from the bottom — it's hard to tell that anything's different at all.

You see, I'm not so sure that the adage that Bahamians like new tings goes much beyond our surfaces, or far beyond our stomachs (and even then, we're picky about what we put there). If a new ting comes attached to a new way of thinking about the world, a new way of seeing ourselves, we run like the blazes in the opposite direction. If we return to Junkanoo for a moment, consider what's really new about it. When was the last time we say something really revolutionary in someone's presentation, or in someone's costume or design? When did someone go out on a limb and bring something truly radical to Bay Street?

The answer lies in the groups who don't get all that much airplay, who don't feature big in the public imagination: Colours, who build small, audition their members, score their music, and paste according to a limited palette of colours; Barabbas, who invented a new way of carrying cowbells and started a whole craze in drumming; the Fox Hill Congoes, a group who are almost gone from the public mind, but who introduced the legions of big bass drums to the parade.

The fact that we don't celebrate these groups for their innovations, but rather ignore their new ideas or ridicule their difference and continue to pick our winners from the tried-and-true pairing of SaxoValle suggests to me that we really don't like new tings as much as we think we do.

You see, the new tings we love best are those that come from away. New ideas, new habits, especially those proposed by Bahamians, are harder to catch on. We'll change clothes and hairstyles and vehicles and televisions and furniture and eating places and preferred vacation styles, but we're a whole lot slower to welcome new ways of doing the things we take for granted.

The trouble is, until we wake up, look hard and embrace innovation, we are going to lose more and more of ourselves. Cultures thrive on change. Without innovation, our culture will continue to assimilate changes that come from beyond. And we'll find that the new tings we do like are going to come more and more from the outside, and will speak less and less to us about our selves.