---

Dear Sir,

Tom Vesey is wrong when he asserts that material wealth hurts our sense of community.

Wealth has never hurt anyone; it is the politically corrosive way that the wealth differential is explained that undermines our sense of community.

We allow our politicians, by our passivity, to stoke up the fires of envy - one of the seven deadly sins.  

Much of politics is grounded in social conflict, of which envy is a very large part. Scores of Latin, German, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Chinese, and Jewish proverbs tell us that envy has never made anyone rich, envy makes people bitter, and envy sees faults rather than virtues. It is a dead end for everyone, except some of Bermuda's  politicians.

  As the majority of our population is black all that needs to be done is to stress that their relative poverty is the fault of the white minority many of whom are non-Bermudians; with that assertion rational argument disappears together with any sense of community.  

As your perceptive columnist Larry Burchall constantly points out relative poverty is mainly caused by a hugely incompetent educational system, but that obvious fact is ignored whilst the blame is put on such phantoms as white institutional racism.   

 Many of our current crop of politicians will never allow a sense of community to develop because it is not in their political interests to do so. As they create social conflict and promote racial envy, they will continue to win the arguments (as well as the elections) so long as too many of our community and business leaders refuse to speak out and continue to be apathetic.

One major reason for their silence and the apathy is the weapon of work permits exploited to the full by a vindictive government.  

  Bermuda is, of course, not the only place to use the weapon of creating social conflict. In India Hindus blamed Moslems, in Northern Ireland Catholics blamed Protestants, in Lebanon Sunni Moslems blamed Shiites, in Canada French speakers blamed English speakers, in Germany in the 1930s many Germans blamed the Jews, the list goes on and on and many other examples could be cited.  

Bermuda is simply a small and insignificant addition to this poisonous brew.

Robert Stewart

Flatts[[In-content Ad]]

---