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The Bermuda National Trust has been taking licks, as they say, for climbing into bed with a major office developer.

Hardly surprising: The island’s premier preservation group not only helped design a huge office block on one of premier historic sites in Hamilton, but endorsed the result.

Enough people have already accused the Trust of ‘selling out’, and setting a scary precedent — including politicians, a couple of former Trust presidents, and a few dozen newspaper letter-writers.

So you don’t need me to sing in that choir.

To me, the fascinating and scary thing isn’t how badly the Trust blundered, but how easy and logical it was for them to do so.

They must have realized how huge and hideous the Bank of Bermuda might make the Trimingham’s site when the historic

Front Street retailer

closed shop.

I’m sure it wasn’t the Trust’s goal to have a seven-storey office building on the Trimingham’s site, even though that’s what they gave their approval to in the end.

They must have known there were few planning restrictions on what the bank could do with the site. And they must have known that waivers and exceptions might well be granted to a well-connected organization like the Bank of Bermuda.

Maybe, the Trust surely concluded, if they worked with the bank, the worst imaginable outrages could be avoided.

It’s hard not to be sympathetic, because it happens all the time.

People routinely let themselves be co-opted by the very organizations you’d think they would be battling.

Sometimes they are hoping to soften the blow in a fight they fear they will never win — to gain some small concession that will reduce the scale of the damage.

Sometimes they are trying to build up good will for future, more important battles.

Sometimes they believe they have more to gain by working ‘from the inside’.

I know, for example, that there are members of the Cabinet — now, but also under former Governments — who are extremely unhappy with the direction their leaders are taking.

Yet they feel they are better off fighting from within for change, or at least for restraint, than by sniping or attacking from the outside.

It’s not just the Cabinet. I’m sure there are members of Government boards and commissions who disagree strenuously with much of what these committees are doing, but feel they can temper the worst outrages by sitting among them.

Are they hypocrites? Are they sell-outs?

Maybe, but I’m glad they are doing it.

We need people to stand up publicly, object to outrages, and refuse to have anything to do with organizations and institutions that are doing wrong.

But we also need people working for change within, whispering quiet words of warning to organizations hell-bent on heading in the wrong direction.

At some point, of course, cooperation goes too far.

Governments who worked with Hitler’s Nazis, or citizens of occupied countries who helped the SS, are perhaps the most extreme case.

They rationalized their actions by reminding people that the Nazis could not be stopped.

If they didn’t cooperate, by deporting Jews or helping run concentration camp work squads on behalf of the Nazis, the Nazis would do it themselves and in their own way — and that would be so much worse.

Even today, well-meaning governments around the world struggle over the best way to deal with cruel and undemocratic regimes.

Is the best way to deal with Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, for instance, to isolate and angrily condemn the country, as many nations have done?

Or is it to criticize softy and diplomatically, as the neighboring South African Government has usually done, hoping to keep a dialogue going and produce better results than an angry stand-off.

This kind of ‘constructive engagement’ can be very effective.

But it can be interpreted as weakness and lack of principle.

It can encourage and legitimize the very actions that need to be condemned, while discouraging and disheartening those who are struggling for change.

The same kind of difficult choices take place on a daily basis here in Bermuda — without, thank God, the hatred and tyranny and bloodshed.

But that doesn’t make the choices easy.

How hard should we fight?

How publicly should we object?

How much should we cooperate in private?

Bermuda is tiny. We are all relatives and friends, or at least friends of friends. It is especially painful to risk rupturing those relationships with public confrontations.

But that’s part of the reason we need organizations like the National Trust to take a stand on our behalf — to do our dirty work, so to speak, and be objectionable on our behalf.

A bank, as the famous bank robber Willie Sutton said, is where the money is.

The Bank of Bermuda has the power to reshape Hamilton in a way that quaint tourist shops do not, and ordinary citizens, do not.

I hope there are people behind the scenes, urging restraint in the Bank of Bermuda’s ear.

But that is not where the Bermuda National Trust should be.[[In-content Ad]]

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