Rotten, if
the Day is to be
believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that
many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So
what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty
percent.
I know all
of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing
its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in
eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I
went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the
New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before
people had smart phones….
“It’s Like
Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in
the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths
of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in
Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million
people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City,
with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto
Rico?
Particularly
worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000
are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t
you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression?
Seems screwy to me….
We are, in
short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer),
and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico.
And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in
English.
Well,
that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get
to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly
transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no
leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said
there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the
license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….
OK—wrap my
head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview
with our new chief of police, James
Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his
childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years
experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.
And he was
around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton
Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff
will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were
jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the
guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted
the service.
Well,
Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities
here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets,
and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen?
You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just
a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace
of mind….
Right, skip
gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and
Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty
on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new
president of the University of
Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal
money.
Lastly, we
come to an opinion piece
by Benjamín
Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super
port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.
Ponce, you
see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most
crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit
on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a
super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and
then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the
Americas.
Great idea,
right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was
proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without
something to show for it.
I’ve seen
them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I
saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through
last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that
were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the
company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some
identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only
problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact,
there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project
profitable.
We then got
to the Playa de
Ponce , a community
so poor that a nun—the
sister of a former governor—had to start a community
center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk
metal.
“It’s the
only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee,
and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants
or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”
Then we
went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and
never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political
squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the
hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.
Guys?
Twenty
years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the
time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange,
the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super
port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until
the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.
And then
what?
Well,
there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….
