0599 - Size

As many of the more astute Readers will have realized by now, Anguilla is not a large island, nor is it extra-populous. There are things you cannot buy here, and things you cannot do. If you yearn for such consumption of goods and services, you will be unhappy here. If, however, you wish good food and wine, you are lucky, because that we have, as well as an almost perfect freedom to do and think as we wish. One politician here doesn’t like a lot of people, but he is so over-verbose as to be unintelligible. Most other people are agreeable and unassuming, except when exercising their positions in the bureaucracy. And as for freedom, Anguilla provides it in plenty. Commerce, not so much, but freedom all the time.

If you are attentive to CNN, and to the information that flows everywhere on the web, you will have noted that the big world is beset by rather cruel people who are never content except when forcing other people to do things they don’t want to do. What sort of religion impels radical Muslims to blow themselves up, along with scores of innocents, in service to some weird religious doctrine saying a cruel God so decrees? In contrast, Anguilla has many differing churches, but so far no one here has preached the duty to destroy all other sects. Even the inept American CIA cannot find here any evidence of secret creation of those famous Weapons of Mass Destruction. And though there is much political discussion, no vicious Tom DeLay type has arisen here to tell others what to do with their dead, or for that matter, what to do with their living. Yet, alas, change is in the wind, for Anguilla is on the verge of a change – it is growing.

Possibly as a result of the flow of untaxed wealth to the rich in the U.S., Anguilla land and houses have been rising in price at an alarming rate. One golf course and accompanying pricey villas is approaching completion, large and high priced rental housing is rising everywhere, and now there is a project to double the number of hotel rooms on the island and add another golf course. American Airlines, practicing inconvenience for the future tourist flood, has cut flights to one a day, at a time when no connection to the mainland can be made. [All must take a ferry to St. Martin to ingress or egress.] This weekend, while the OO was at one of our famed ribs/chicken/fish seaside grills in heavy discourse with the owner Nat, he offered a bet that there would be legal gambling on Anguilla in five years. Nat, canny and knowing in Anguillian ways, would not bet.

This confirms that Anguilla is on the verge of no longer being small. When you have roulette, craps, not to mention golf and that new craze poker, innocence is lost. Next, there will be all the other trappings of urban decay, just like St. Martin and St. Thomas. There’s a new Subway here, and what looks a lot like a Kentucky Fried Chicken, threatening the classic Anguilla roadside grills made of split water heaters (at least that’s what they seem to be made of). We already have one large supermarket, and two smaller, and a mall has opened. These are the markers of that disease called Incipient Suburbia, It is here. Watch for a – gasp! – Wal-Mart.

Dear Readers, next week will be our six-hundredth OO column. Our technical Staff is getting ready to transfer this priceless store to CDs, and offer to you every column ever written. Yet, as we approach this landmark, innocent Anguilla, the object of our affection, is disappearing even as we preserve its memory. Farewell, thou small but special island!

Next time: Landmark [OO #600]

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