0591 - Change

Change [OO #591]

This is to be a calm column about the pace of change (or no change) on Anguilla. And we shall deliver. If you want some angry overruns from last week's column, please see the Addendum at the end. Now, about change and Anguilla. The OO is in a second decade of living in Anguilla, and finds the air pure, the Expats eccentric and flavorful, and the local Anguillians friendly and highly resistant to change. Examples abound.

Now, please do not understand our story to be that Anguillians are not alive to the world at large, or not attracted to anything new. Not at all. In that sense, a new grocery store is welcomed. But consider construction. Here are hundreds of houses in the very slow process of construction. Some haven't been touched in a dozen years. Many have finished and occupied ground floors, with upper stories partly built, but in a quiescent state. A Capitalist might say that an unfinished house is an asset returning no "use value". Not here. In some deep way, the slow organic growth is the Anguillian way.

As for procedures, you have to go through a Government exercise to see remnants of the practices of the British Raj. Usually, one must go to one office to start on the trail – say an auto license – and then to the Finance Office to pay the fee. The fee is taken in and then a small handwritten receipt is issued from a pad where a carbon copy is kept. This hand-crafted receipt is absolutely standard, although computers abound. Why not issue a computer receipt? There is no answer.

The procedure for catching the ferry to St. Martin is to get your name entered on the manifest and then go to a window where a tiny fee ticket is bought for US$3, destined to be immediately handed in as one leaves. Why not have the Ferry Operator collect an extra $3 and pay in to Customs? No answer is ever forthcoming, except that is the way it is done.
After deep reflection, we believe this attachment to old and useless procedures is part of the reason for the beneficial placidity of Anguilla. Stress is reduced by the familiar. You can see an apartment building here with a yard where the owner has left two large rusting trucks so long that tree trunks have grown up through the floors and out the windshields. We are told he refuses to move the hulks. Why? Probably because that would be change, and change is stress. Stress in un-Anguillian. Try this, you might like it

Addendum: This week, there was much Schiavo litigation, much TV coverage, and no court interference with finally turning off the artificial support for the poor vegetative remnant of Terri. The objectors cried that the remnant was being mistreated, in great pain from starvation. As far as one can glean from the responsible medical views, when in a Permanent Vegetative State, there is no cognition, no connection to the world, and no evidence of feeling any pain because there is no conscious brain to function. Yet, mused our Ethicist, suppose somehow that as claimed she isn't "really" dead, can feel pain, and is in the most exquisite torture. That is as tenable as the view that somehow she wants to survive in PVS. How horrible to think that she has been kept in Hades for 15 years.

Further, says the Ethical One, what do the supposedly bleeding hearts Pols (like the awful Tom DeLay) say to the thousands and millions who are alive but hungry, in desperate need of medicines, food, housing? To them, we note, the proposal is to reduce Medicare and cut taxes forever on the super-wealthy. Is this hypocrisy? Oh, yes.

Next time: Ideas [OO #592]

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