Dear Editor,
We've gone from the neighborhood-friendly drug lord to the neighborhood-friendly number lord. Lawlessness has become so acceptable in The Bahamas that we don't even recognize it when it's plastered on the cover of our daily newspapers.
I fear lawlessness has seeped so deep into the fabric of who we are as a people that 100-plus murders a year is the least of our worries.
There's very little the commissioner of police or the attorney general can do. Our problem is far larger and much more deeply rooted than their resources can reach.
The number houses are cannibalizing the income of already struggling inner city folks and soon the web shops will start cannibalizing each other, akin to the drug wars we became so accustomed to in the 1980s and early 1990s. And the only solution we can come up with is to tax them? Seriously?
The notion that people will still buy numbers so why shut them down is one of the most asinine arguments ever. We've been murdering each other since the beginning of time (remember Cain and Abel). So should we just legalize murder and tax the murderers seeing that it's not going anywhere? Come on people.
We are watching our country literally fall apart with our eyes wide open. We have to take our collective heads out of the sand and stop pretending we aren't part of the problem and just as much part of the solution.
I always try to remain hopeful but this is a battle that we're losing fast.
- Farrell Goff

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