Dear Editor,

Thank you for allowing the printing of this pre-independence exhortation to our country.
This article is not about the distribution of blame. Let us get that straight right out of the gate. And speaking about "gate", a person once said that when the alligators are out of the gate and are in the swimming pool, that is not the time to ask who let them out. In this case, this is not the time to castigate those "who let the dogs out". Rather, this article, as a part one of a three part series, is an attempt to appropriate individual responsibility and invoke national accountability.
Permit me to lay a philosophical framework to use as a backdrop for the points to be raised. Later in this article we will engage in a precursory, but visceral view into the theological, social, and moral variables that come together as the pieces of our social puzzle and social challenges. Humanity is endowed with a myriad character, emotive and personality traits. We are an everliving, dynamic and adjustable organism. It was Aristotle himself who recognized the scientific laws of opposites. Hot only exists in the context of cold. Up can only exist in the context of down. If there is no tall, there can be no short, no big -- then no small. Okay, point taken. In a social sense, these laws of absolutism also find their oppositional counterpart. Consequently, they too can become a thorn in our social side, a pain in the communal flesh. There are variables we must be sensitized to. There are variables, entities, experiences we must be desensitized too. The problem is that given our humanity, given our moral and immoral proclivities, there is oft-times confusion, intermingling and displacing and obfuscation of operation from time to time. In this context, I wish to introduce the term desensitization, its opposite, sensitization, and the active, imperative term resensitization.
A community is shocked, appalled and stirred to action over the violent death of an individual. It is sensitized to this abnormality, this absurdism, this anti-communal act. There is expressed outrage, protests, a desire to become engaged in mental vigilantism to inflict individual justice. But at the same time, this sensitivity is gradually diminished over time due to the increased occurrence of such violence. This is almost a necessary mental, psychological and biological response in order to ensure survival -- at least mentally. Alas, we become tolerant, bit by bit, degree by degree. And then kicks in the law of desensitization. We become desensitized, we become tolerant, not necessarily intentionally, not necessarily immorally, but just desensitized. Only when a more atrocious, horrendous act occurs does our ire become re-awakened. We make psychological adjustments ever so slowly, so subtly.
According to Sigmund Freud, we are fascinated with death and primarily so because it is not our own -- it is another. It is the "other", it is external. It is the other -- the opposite. Not me -- but you! In a sense we become narcissistically concerned that it is not us. Then we become indifferent, apathetic and casual. Death has avoided us, or rather we have avoided death, and so we breathe a sigh of relief -- sorry it is you, thank God it is not me. The profundity of Dr. M.L. King eludes us when he declared that, "each man's death diminishes me", there is a part of me that dies in each man's death, for I am a part of the fabric, the tapestry of life. This declaration alone encapsulates almost the quintessential point of this entire article. We know that, statistically speaking, our calamity had to be avoided. It is like reading the obituary column when we do. We really only scrutinize it and evince heartfelt emotions when there is a personal, "me" connection; when it is a relative, a friend, etc. Likewise, we are no longer our brother's keeper. We no longer feel our brother's pain. We are not responsible for our brother's welfare, at least not absolutely. We fail to realize that there is a mutually reciprocal relationship between being our brother's keeper and our own survival. As brother's keeper, we all look out for each other since each man is each man's brother, each man's neighbor. But instead, we practice a new form of psycho-social Darwinism being primarily concerned with being a part of "the fittest" who survives physically. There is a failure to understand the theological profundity of Cain's question. We fail to understand the inherent responsibility, dogma, that the question declares emphatically -- that each man is each man's brother socially, economically, morally, that each man is a part of each man.
We have mastered two terms: "self" and the "other". And therein lies our fundamental problem. There is no word in the dictionary as "inother", rather, we have "another". The emphasis is on "I" -- inother, to the exclusion of the other -- listed as "a" -- absent, apathetic, estranged -- "another". The other, another, has forever been our escapism clause. So we have created an existence that is "separate and apart" from us and not an existence that is a part of us. Therefore, we fail to realize that any behavior that does not establish brotherhood, "in-otherhood", is a behavior that is anti-God, anti-love and anti-life. In a sense, Cain decreed the first divorce. He sought to disassociate himself from his own biological kin-flesh. He did not realize his divine oneness with his brother. He did not recognize his own obligation to himself through the recognition of the other. Cain killed not only Abel directly, but Cain also killed the brotherhood of man indirectly; Cain killed Cain.
Man's first sin is not recognizing his ultimate divine responsibility, accountability to himself, to God, through his brother. How oft has Jesus attempted to re-awaken our sensitivity to the worth of our brother? How oft has Jesus not sought to awaken us through the moral dictum love your neighbor as yourself? When you love yourself and value and appreciate yourself, then love your neighbor similarly, then you cannot hurt him. How often has Jesus attempted to redeem Cain, to redeem us through the repositioning of Abel in our consciousness? You are your brother's keeper. How can you say you love God, whom you do not see, but hate your brother, who you see everyday, everywhere? Scriptures abound with such redemptive themes, with such redemptive opportunities, but we miss it. Hence, we all live as marked men, marked women, exposed and vulnerable to vengeance and violence.
In our self-centeredness, self-interest in achieving, accumulating and heaping treasures for ourselves, pursuing our material comforts, we have lost sight of our brother. We are sensitive to our needs, but insensitive to the needs of others. We have become individually desensitized to the other, because he is "another" and not "inother". This phenomenon happens on the micro level, but sadly and inevitably it transacts itself on the macro level also. It moves from individual indifference to societal indifference, or at least societal tolerance. And from societal indifference we progress, or should I say degress, to national and international, politically and even religiously. The individual, having lost his sensitivity, is now operating in a desensitized dimension and only more gross acts of violence captures heartfelt attention.
In pt. 2 we get to the meat of this article and in pt. 3, recommended solutions. It references philosophical rationalization for the individual and cultural degeneration of authority; the abuse of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity; the dethroning of God and the subsequent enthroning of the government or the state as the final political and ecclesiastical authority, and how these fuel criminality in our Bahamaland. Stay tuned.

- Dr. "B"

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