Dear Editor,
So, my intelligent and rational wife and I were stuck in the traffic that ate Chicago the other day and all around us were worker bees in hi-vis clothing cutting grass and making the island look presentable for the royal visit. She commented in an offhand manner that what should really happen is that the royal family should announce a visit once a month or something so it became the norm for the island to be cleaned up and look good rather than the open sewer and dump that its residents turn it into on a daily basis. It was funny the way she said it for a minute, but after a minute it dawned on me just how true that was.
We have a spectacular environment here and yet, every single minute of every single day it gets torn up and abused by the very people that live here. Junk cars abandoned for years. Garbage piled anywhere there is an open space, go to the beach on any Monday and the trash left behind by the local beachgoers on the weekend would get you thrown in jail anywhere else in the world. Why is that? But more to the point, why is it allowed to continue generation after generation? Is it cultural? Are you saying out loud for all to hear? This is our island and if we want to live like schlubs up to our ankles in trash then that’s our right?
It is your right to say it and live like that, but then why the hypocrisy? “Oh my god, the Dutch are coming, quick, mow the grass, pick up the trash, get a quick coat of paint over the rot so they think we aren’t bozos after all.” Who do you think you are fooling with this? You don’t think the royals know exactly what’s going on?
You can fix this mindset. Just like the scooter gangs that terrorize traffic, the quad and bike parades that clog traffic for miles (one bike parade had traffic stopped for 167 cars at 0 miles per hour the other day, I counted them going the other way, and the quads are worse), the taxis and buses that stop in the middle of the road, the absurd service charges you allow restaurants to put on a check as a demand rather than a request for a tip, etc., it all happens simply because you allow it.
You allow an influx of new cars without ever having to turn in an old one for every new one registered. Result? An hour to go 5 miles. You have VROMI whose job it is to protect you handcuffed by politics so buildings get built to the worst possible standards because there is no competent professional inspection protocol with any teeth in it and the building code dates back 75 years and the new proposed ones are, effectively, worthless.
Do you know that there is no firefighting equipment on the island that can fight a fire above the 5th floor? And that, according to the manager at the water production plant, the total production capacity of the plant could not support the water demand to fight such a fire through the hydrant system? Yet how many hi-rises are there now that have neither their own pumping system nor their water reserve to fight such a fire? Quick answer? None. So when one of these places burns one of these days, and it will, what you will have will be Kentucky Fried Tourist done medium well and everyone will scream “How can that possibly happen?”
District 721 burned to the ground the other day. Even the most naive and uninformed would walk in that place and know what a complete fire trap it was, yet it got a permit and got built. And then it burned like everyone knew it would. Why? Again, the answer will be simple: because you allow to happen.
You have an island with a population of about the size of a good-sized small city in the United States. That city runs with a mayor, a city council, its own version of VROMI and a few public service departments. You have a parliament here that thinks it’s running all of Europe, so caught up in its own self-importance that it spends all its time deciding how many parliamentary rules someone is breaking rather than getting anything done. I know you are a country and want all the pomp and circumstance that goes along with that, but in the end, people, someone has to hunker down and actually do the work, not just talk about it until everybody dies of old age.
This island could be spectacular every day, not just when the royals come to town. And it would really be easy to do. All you have to do is have the will to do it. And you might be surprised that if that will actually materialized, how quickly the Dutch would take you seriously. And then, as they say, the dice would really be rolling.
When you want to be taken seriously the first thing that always has to happen is that you take yourself seriously and do the work. The rest follows as a matter of course. Respect is earned. And you don’t earn it by just showing up.
Steven Johnson
