THE AVALANCHE OF CURSING IN OUR COUNTRY

AN EVENING AT POOP DECK ALMOST SPOILED

The evening with the Mitchell siblings was to be a nice quiet reunion.  Fred and Lilla’s Children together again, who knows for what time.  There are countless gatherings of this type going through the country on a typical weekend.  Families are trying to hold it together. They get together in the face of the pandemic, the economic recession, the hurricane, the deaths and the deconstruction. Trying to remember what your parents taught you, the values that were supposed to let you get through any time or place.

All went well.  The Poop Deck is a great restaurant. The food was great. The company was even  better, except at the very end, it was almost ruined by the act of insensitivity and ignorance which is hard to fathom, even in this era of hard times.

As dinner was ending, a boat started its engines and then in violation of the rules of the marina which say no idling of your boat, one of its customers decided to idle his boat.  The engine noise, the gasoline fumes came up to the deck where food and company existed. The men in the boat did not care.  So one of the Mitchells objected as the gasoline fumes got worse. That is when the situation disintegrated.

It may not be relevant but one was a bald headed black man, light skinned black man. The other a young white man at the controls.  Instead of apolgising for the discomfort. The black man started screaming that those who objected were asses and then it went down hill from there.  The word beginning with f and f and f and f over and over again, from a simple request to follow the rules and not idle your boat in the marina.

The problem is that this happens all too often in The Bahamas.  It is not atypical.  It is now typical.  So every weekend, incidents such as these happen in the middle of a good time.  You cannot go to a public place without expecting some form of incivility, some crudities, some kind of disturbance.  This has reached the point where people simply do not want to venture into public places any more.

There is an avalanche of this cursing everywhere. There is an avalanche of incivility from the Parliament right down to the  marina at Poop Deck.

To be sure Poop Deck had nothing to do with this.  The young black man was simply an idiot of the first order, who was suffering from some issues that night and who knows for always.   The waitress apologised.  That was fine because the family went on to take the  family photo and enjoy the rest of the evening.  But somewhere deep in the soul, as the sister who lives in New York returns home, and the others to the various habitations in Nassau, one wonders whether or not what Mama and Pop said in Collins Avenue really can take us through this new world in The Bahamas.