Dear Editor,
Over the past few days I have read the reflections circulating online from St. Martiners, especially young St. Martiners, with a mixture of recognition and concern. Their words carry all of our frustration, but also something much more important: attachment. Their voices are not those of people who have given up on our island but those who still care enough to speak out.
That is precisely why they deserve to be heard with seriousness rather than dismissed as merely negative, emotional, or impatient; there is nothing unreasonable about looking at the state of St. Martin with a feeling of unease. There is nothing unfair about questioning traffic that consumes hours of people’s lives, or about a utilities system more fragile than it should be, development moving faster than the infrastructure required to support it, and a quality of life that is being steadily eroded.
I now also read these voices not only as someone from St. Martin, but also as someone who works across the wider Caribbean and, more poignantly, as a new father. Working regionally has provided me perspective, but becoming a parent has introduced in me a worry in the pit of my belly knowing that it is no longer about how we are living today, but about what kind of island will remain for my son’s generation and whether we are tending to this country with the seriousness that this extraordinary place demands.
What many are expressing is grounded in the fact that too many of the issues being discussed have lingered for years without any meaningful resolution. They are asking whether enough attention is being paid in a way that is grounded, honest, and visible; they are asking whether stewardship still exists in a meaningful sense. And they have every right to ask.
It is not the responsibility of ordinary citizens, least of all frustrated young people, to arrive with polished policy prescriptions before they are allowed to voice concern. They do not need to solve traffic to say that daily gridlock is eroding quality of life; they do not need to redesign the energy grid in order to point out how dangerous dependency and fragility have become; they do not need to come with technical answers in order to name the neglect that has unfolded in front of them for decades. Their first right is not to solve. It is to be heard. They are asked to be more patient, more constructive, more measured, more diplomatic. Yet while this is happening, the conditions provoking their concern remain plainly visible. And so frustration begins to settle into normalcy. And this is a most dangerous moment for any society, because once decline starts to feel routine people will slowly lose faith in the very idea that things can improve.
Working throughout the Caribbean has also made something else clear to me; St. Martin is not the only island facing pressure, but there are places with fewer resources and less visibility that are beginning to confront their limits with greater honesty than we often allow ourselves and that comparison can be uncomfortable. We have long taken pride in our resilience, our dynamism, and our ability to move quickly. Yet there are times when that confidence drifts into hubris, when we behave as though we are exempt from the consequences of poor planning, from the realities of overextension, or from the natural limits of a Small Island Developing State. We have built, expanded, approved, and promised as though roads, utilities, coastlines, hillsides, neighborhoods, and our very social fabric itself can endlessly absorb more pressure. They cannot.
That is why the question of capacity matters so much. Development is not simply a matter of what can be built; it is also a matter of what can be sustained. A serious country must ask whether it can cope with the competence and continuity required to manage growth responsibly. It speaks to whether we treat our country as something to steward or merely something to use, or abuse. And often by those with interests way outside of our extraordinary community.
What gives me hope though, despite all of this, is that these voices are still being raised. Concern is not the opposite of patriotism but one of its clearest expressions. The young people speaking now are not detached from St. Martin but are attached to it, often by their navel strings buried in this soil. Like mine. Like my son’s. And their frustration comes precisely from that attachment. They want better from the place because they still believe it can be better. They want to feel that this country is more than traffic, strain, neglect. They want to believe that it is still possible to live here with dignity, pride, and some confidence in the future.
As a new father I am forced to think not only about the island we inherited, but also about the island we are shaping through action or inaction. Through complacency. St. Martin deserves more than a politics of reaction and more than a public culture in which concern is treated as an inconvenience. The people speaking up deserve to know that their country hears them, that their concerns are valid, and that caring enough to speak is still worth something.
If St. Martin is to have a future worthy of its people, one of the first things we must recover is the ability to listen seriously when our own sons and daughters tell us, plainly and without ornament, that something is not right.
Tadzio Bervoets
