EDITOR: St Vincent and the Grenadines is known by every Vincentian for its natural beauty and strength in the physical features all packed into our 32 islands. We are and should be very proud of the number of ways in which God has truly blessed our homeland. The singing of the national anthem and other patriotic songs conjures up emotions of pride and sentimentalism, as we are overwhelmed with how much we love these lands.

Many Vincentians travel out, but on speaking with them, you will hear of the longings to be home and to visit, amidst all the success and prosperity they find in the outer world. The feelings of our people for our country are emotionally charged and run deep. You witness this in the passionate exchanges between Vincentians, about anything with national implications, including politics.

SVG, however, has been extremely bombarded by the influences of the outer world, through the media. Internet and cable television have revolutionized this land.

The questions to ask, however, are: What makes us unique as a people? And, how do we positively shape the view of the outside

world of us? Also, how do we want the generations proceeding us to live?

Vincentians are achieving in many areas overseas. They are winning awards, climbing ladders in the corporate world, academically standing out and thriving in many ways. Here, however, we seem not to be thinking deeply about better for our own society. In fact, it seems that a high proportion of what is brewing is a culture of degradation and gangstership.

What is forcing the descendants of slaves to choose to regard themselves with less than healthy self-respect, in proportions so great, that the cause is nationally championed? Is national financial gain the new slave master? Do we care to stand up for things on a national scale because of their moral value with nothing that involves material give and take?

Soft porn and seminudity is the order of the day. If this is not visible on one of our local channels, we can hear the images being painted in the song lyrics on public transport vehicles or radio stations. Vulgarity and bad words are on the tongues of our children.

It seems that even the voices of the God-fearing are silenced by some mysterious force, where the moral scales are malfunctioning, or have been put into storage in some unused room in the basements of our places of worship. Christians are all now invited to celebrate immorality and the worship of strange gods as culture.

This is the nation we are showing to the world around us. But even more alarmingly important, this is the nation we have become and educating our young to see as normal. Is this a reflection of our roots?

Did God not always punish and remove blessings from the peoples and lands where men turned their back on Him for strange gods of foreign nations and where they exchanged Him for heathen idols?

Art and culture are not ultimate yardsticks for moral standards. A person winning an award for being scantily dressed does not make it right or wrong. Our ideas of beauty and festivity, though profitable for the here and now and seemingly entertaining, are still being witnessed by the powers of morality in the heavens. Are we selling out to strange gods?

St Vincent and the Grenadines, “For the time already past is sufficient for you to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatries.” 1 Peter 4:3

Do we know that amongst our ancestors that were enslaved were bloodlines of craftsmen, artists, doctors, leaders, clergy and the descendants of renown dynasties of progressive civilizations with high morals and noble values? Alternatively, are our ideas of the motherland based on the propaganda by masters of scantily clad, obeah working, jungle warriors?

Are we in fact portraying a status of freedom or enslavement?

This might be an indication of who is the master of our master, master of our freedom or master of our continued redressed slavery.

Vinny Newton