PLP are modern redcoats fighting off common sense

There is an image from the long ago past. It is of red-coated British soldiers forming a square and holding off a charging enemy.

This image is captured in several paintings of past battles.

In 2010, the image applies to the PLP.

The strident voices of Brown, Burch, Burgess, Commissiong and Furbert mark the centre and four corners of the vitriol-spitting square.

In between are files of supporters — some silent, some vocal.

Today’s PLP square is as outdated as that old 1815 square of British redcoats.

Today’s Bermuda faces issues almost devoid of genuine or real racial problems.

History

Good or bad, Bermuda’s past is still the past. Good or bad, Bermuda’s now is still now.

Whatever happened in the past, Bermuda’s future is still coming. 

Continual references to the past do not alter Bermuda’s still-mounting national debt.

Bermuda’s slave history did not suddenly materialise and become the decision makers or the decision-making process that, between 2004 and 2010, made the long string of bad management decisions that will cause our approaching financial crisis.

Mr. Eugene Cox never perorated or fulminated about slavery and a bad past. He moved on. He dealt with the present and the future.

As PLP Finance Minister from November 1998 to February 2004, Mr. Cox managed Bermuda’s national finances.

He worked at moving Bermuda and all Bermudians forward.

He dealt with problems, both political and financial, honestly and forthrightly.

National financial records show Mr. Cox did an excellent job of managing Bermuda’s finances.

Now, in 2010, with steadily mounting, self-created financial problems, the PLP men and women who form that PLP square are spitting bullets about race. In doing this, they are creating a cloud of race-smoke just like the cloud of gun-smoke that marked the presence of a fighting British square.

However, there is a difference. The British square was used to fight off ‘fuzzie-wuzzies’ and ‘Frenchies’ and others.

This PLP square has formed to fight off common sense and sound practice.

The old Brit square was efficient and effective for the right reasons. It preserved British lives.

This new PLP square is also efficient and effective — but for the wrong reasons. It fights off common sense and good sense. The smoke from this PLP square is a massive cloud of distraction.

The bullets of vitriol shoot down people possessed with common sense.

So here we are. Bermuda, an isolated, delicate economy balanced on the narrow column of now-shaky international business with tourism a badly shrunken column too weak to stand alone.

Bermuda, facing a long period of unwisely inflicted and steadily rising national debt accompanied by an insidious and already started fall-off in real Government spending. Bermuda, with rising violent crime, rising gunplay and rising body counts from this violence.

Bermuda, after 12 years of PLP management, dumping yet another year’s worth of under-educated, under-prepared, under-trained young black men into Bermuda’s complex, sophisticated, knowledge-based and high skill-set workplace.

Amid all stands this PLP square, spitting vitriol, spitting disharmony and spitting the past while ignoring the present and harming the future.

I had no idea this Brown-led PLP was so fond of Brit redcoats. No idea at all.