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Bermuda Day was perhaps a most fitting time for us to reflect on what it means to be a community and to share a common wealth and a mutual sense of belonging. Tom Vesey's column of May 23 encapsulates for me why we continue to get it wrong because our angle of vision is too acute and our sense of the possible is infinitesimally small.

Mr. Vesey states a noble intent. He wants to challenge us to ask how far we have come in "creating some kind of authentic Bermuda where Bermudians feel like real people, who are real members of a real community."

At its surface this sounds like a reasonable and indeed perspicacious and penetrating question. So since Mr. Vesey has thrown down the gauntlet, I accept this opportunity to duel and dialogue with a fellow Bermudian.

And I want everyone to overhear our conversation.

Commerce, capitalistic acquisition and cut-throat competition for resources have framed everything that Bermuda is. We began as a nation caught up in the swirling eddies of British versus Spanish imperial control of the world and from that genesis Bermudians have used our considerable talent to steal and to plunder and to live off the ill gotten material gains.

For a certain class of Bermudians the desire for material gain led to the importation of Africans from the Caribbean who worked for free and Portuguese labourers who gave of their sweat and industry to contribute to the narrow success paradigm of a small elect. The material gain was not shared. The wealth that was produced because of the sweat and labour of the many, never trickled down.

We called that progress.

So when this elite then engaged in their community building forays to make Bermuda a playground for the rich, they ensured that golf courses would dot our country so that the captains of commerce and the titans of transformation would acquire more and more for themselves while the masses of our citizens toiled for crumbs.

Paving the way for International Business was the "brainchild" of this elite and for the most part they and their friends and the law firms and accounting firms owned by their friends have benefitted handsomely and the masses must be grateful and content with the charity that these globe trotting robber barons dole out to our people. Thank you for the crumbs, Sirs.

So the politics of the moment are just an extension of this same tired old game. Commerce rules, dog eat dog competition is the order of the day. If you cannot swim you will drown because your neighbour has to get hers! The tragedy is that the masses are fighting each other for crumbs.

Mr. Vesey, it is the natural and logical outcome of our current economic and social arrangements that there always must be an underclass, an outsider and a vagrant because we worship the almighty dollar and success is measured one commodity at a time. Can we seriously expect that the economic arrangements that gave us slavery and sanctioned it in law and made discrimination in housing, and commerce normative, to be the same system that will create the "authentic Bermuda" you claim to desire?



Our system must continue to have "outsiders and those who struggle" because it is based on a winner take all system of doling out benefits and privileges not based on needs that affirm the life, and dignity of people, but rewards the cut-throat, competitive, rugged, individualist.

How else can you explain our penchant for holding up millionaire CEOs as role models in a country where there are people too poor to pay for their own medicine? How can we laud the achievements of the corporate giants in our midst who think that a well publicized scholarship or donation here and there absolves them?

Our country, Mr. Vesey, worships greed and the accumulation of material goods and the competitive jostling that pits us against each other. Who has time to build community when we are busy shopping, accumulating the latest gadgets and showing off the latest brands?

This is the outcome of a set of economic arrangements that were the foundation stone of our island and continue to be normative at the highest and lowest echelons of our system. The poorest of the poor have the same acquisitive mindset as the wealthiest among us.

But the funny thing about all of this Mr. Vesey is that Bermudians of all stripes, and our long term residents cousins that hail from all over the earth, are a strange bunch. You see as many of them toil each day for a dollar that buys them less and less. And as they purchase yet another gadget that is obsolete as soon as they leave the store, Bermudians and our long term resident cousins are awaking to the lie that our lives are just about materialism and consumerism.

There is great dissatisfaction with the present status quo that says that "he who dies with the most toys, wins, and she that purchases the most shoes gets the prize."

What joins us as Bermudians at this moment in our national story, is our inexorable dawning to the reality that what shapes us, and goads us on is a sense that our lives, and our efforts and our trials have meaning in a way that materialism cannot ever satisfy. To be a Bermudian - and this is equally true for our long term resident cousins - is to be gripped by a communal sense of solidarity that we are linked together in a way that transcends geography, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age or educational level.

But you will miss it Mr. Vesey if you just look narrowly at our little nation through the myopic lens of politics and economics. Bermudians and our long term resident cousins do community in a multitude of ways. It is fluid, flexible and ever evolving. In fact it refuses to be pinned down. In fact it sucks you into its vortex.

Even in the "divided" days of slavery, Bermudians continued to traverse the laws. The Trimingham family line is a testament to how strong the need for community transcends race and gender and income. We have Mings', Trimms' and Inghams' which attests to creative communalism. Not all of those "couplings" were romantic, but some were and we have an ongoing manifestation of that seen in the diverse shades on our island to this day.

Go to any family reunion and you will see blond haired and blue eyed, and dark skinned members of the same family tree all with the same surname; DeSilva, Pacheco, Furbert and Smith! Bermuda is perhaps the only country in the world where drug dealers and prison inmates have impeccable manners and where people you have never seen before greet you in the street like you are a long lost relative!

In the eastern most section of our nation Lambs and Foxes co-exist and even lie down together. On a trip overseas Bermudians can recognize each other across shopping malls and airports and university campuses. Within months of arriving here, some of our expat cousins take on some of these values and meet and greet like the rest of us. Others never do.

To be a Bermudian is to embrace all of this diversity as our national story that bridges every gap and jumps over ever chasm that tries to separate us. To be a Bermudian of authenticity is to accept that one never has to choose because all of this mixing and matching and intermingling that manifests itself in our accents and idioms, and skin and eye colour, is a testament that we are a people on the move together. Economic disparity, political chicanery and skullduggery, cannot touch this core. So we will continue to bicker and fight because that is what families do when members chase greed and self aggrandizement at the expense of family ties.

To be a Bermudian is to accept the fundamental principle that we are one family. And like every family we have "outside" children. But even those greedy, selfish, egomaniacs that hog the resources are still family. We still love them and if we hear anyone speaking ill of them we will be the first to jump to their public defence but when we get them home behind closed doors, we will chastise them, and then grab the Farine pie, macaroni and cheese and extra sweet Kool-aid and break out the marbles! n

Bermudian John-Anthony Burchall is a Master of Divinity Candidate at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C.

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