Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! I wonder what the New Year will bring?
It seems like only yesterday we were all worrying (or not) about whether the “Millennium Bug” was going to bring the world to its knees! And here we still are!
The newspaper is taking a break, and by the time it returns on Jan. 7 the Tortola Pier Park will have opened and the National Health Insurance scheme will be up and running. At least, to use a favourite expression of our legislators, they “hope so.”
A “Christmas” sitting of the House of Assembly is scheduled for Monday, at which not much business will be conducted, but members will tell their constituents how great they, the members, are, in a time-honoured ritual of “Want a wall? No problem. And don’t forget to vote for me next time. Oh, and bring your family with you.”
That will be old news when we return, so we shall miss commenting on their utterings.
Suddenly we are eco-warriors, worrying about seaweed, solar power, climate change, and sharks. But we overkill lobsters for a festival, forget about the money wasted on the non-productive greenhouses, and still want to build a $400 million airport.
We are concreting over everything in sight, so that water has nowhere to go after heavy rains, but we have stopped building cisterns to collect it. We are ruining a pretty unspoilt beach in the vain hopes of relieving another pretty, but spoilt, bay. We can’t get rid of wrecked ships cluttering our shoreline, or scrap vehicles littering our roadsides.
In order to worry about all this, we, who carry no weight in the world at all, emit tons of carbon dioxide gas flying, probably first class, around the world attending meetings, from which come nothing meaningful, except more hot air and chopped down trees. I wonder if we pay a voluntary carbon emission tax on our flights, and whether it is budgeted for?
But government, ships agents, and taxi drivers are ecstatic over the increase in cruise tourism, so the rest of us will have to go along with it.
So why are we still here? We love it, and would rather fight than switch! Happy New Year!
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