THE BAHAMAS AND VICTIMHOOD

The Governor of Florida Ron Desantis was quoted by Newsweek.com as saying to refugees from the storm in The Bahamas who want to come to Florida: “If you need relief, that’s not what Florida is set up for… Florida is helping to send resources to The Bahamas so the relief can be administered there.”  That will tell us. Bahamians are up in uproar because they cannot get  a pass into the United States or Canada to work on the special conditions for storm victims. Some of them tried to get into Florida on a boat without visas and they were turned back. This made quite a fuss in the US press. The Black community and  two Senators from Florida have also weighed in with the thought that there needs to be special conditions to allow Bahamians fleeing the storm to come to the U S.  Donald Trump in his usual clumsy and offensive way talked about keeping some  very bad people from coming into the US from The Bahamas, so he  was not inclined to  relax the entry requirements for Bahamians. Sad to say these right wingers are not usually right but so far the objective conditions do not warrant any special  provisions.  First, our point is that there should be no visa or other requirements for Bahamians to work or live in the US in the first place.  Secondly, the country is not in a state of collapse.  Try as we might to portray this as a scene from the Haitian Armageddon, what happened in Abaco was not that.  The country has the resources and the management capability to recover from the storm. What it lacks is leadership.  The people seem to have the feeling of abandon ship. Their leaders have done nothing to counter that view.  Instead we are being portrayed overseas as victims, helpless and  our government inept like every other nation of majority Black people.   The US is their country and they have a right to say who comes and goes. This is ours. In this storm, it appears that we depended on the U S authorities and volunteers to get us back up and going and look to them to rescue us from the thing in its entirety.  So in the end whose country is it?