Confusion unleashed routinely breeds mistakes; and – confusion-tinged motivation can also lead to hurt and death on either side of any socially constructed divide.

One of the sadder facts of our shared social life in today’s Bahamas has to do with that vast difference which separates rich from poor; and which also differentiates the working poor from so-called ‘criminal’ elements.

Much of this echoes Milo Butler’s depiction of the fight for justice in The Bahamas as a titanic struggle between the Masses and the Classes.

This analysis points in a direction that tells a story concerning class struggle and how this fight plays into those larger issues concerning nation-building in a small island developing state such as The Bahamas.

At the core of this struggle we find conflicting narratives, perspectives world-views and definitions of the ‘good life’. At one end of this spectrum are to be found so-called and self-described Bahamians who would arrogate to themselves authority to define what is normal; how others should live and as to why those who are on the bottom-looking-up should learn how to do with the little they have.

These high-society types – evidently – would love to keep things the way they are; even if this effort brought with it more and more police-driven assaults on what seems an endless crime-wave.

In turn, some on the bottom rungs of this society routinely tip in the direction of seeing themselves as sufferers and strangers in a society they derisively describe as Babylon.

When we add to this motley mix foreigners who are here only because they want either a better life for themselves or an easy way to make an even quicker dollar, we soon realize that we have on our hands the makings for a society where trouble is always brewing.

Sadder still, it is a society where most of our leaders are out of touch with reality as it is lived at street-corner level; thus much of the confusion between the police and youth in certain heart-land communities.

We would also suggest that, some who would lead and evidently, some who now lead and any number waiting in the wings to be in charge are clearly out of touch with the lives and circumstances of the serried masses they yearn to have under their command. Highest on that list of those who seem to have nary a clue are politicians who – even as they have demonstrated that have what it takes to be a part of a winning team – are hopelessly out of touch with what they are called to do and achieve as the people’s delegates.

We need not exclude from this rank of those out of touch any number of this nation’s hundreds of religious, pastors, clerics and a motley crew of otherwise-anointed ones.

Some of these people are so caught up with their routines and rituals that they sometimes wake to find themselves on the outside looking in on a society that is dropping to pieces.

This sense of decay is closely related to what some among us describe as a new species of decadence; situations where men and women [and on occasion their children] are dragooned into lives festooned with sin, deviance and crime.

Such excesses and such abuse of human dignity are to be expected in a society where money seems to be the only nexus binding this class to another; or this individual to his so-called ‘friend’.

Put simply, we now seem to be gravitating to a cruel place where practically everyone is out of touch with everyone else- and where the dignity of the human person is routinely being violated.

It is in this sense that poverty can be seen as one of the more vicious assaults that can be perpetrated by any one class upon another.

This reality is today being accentuated by some and ignored by some who could – were they to wake up – make a difference that matters.

These men and women are up against a tide of disaster which seems to know no end.

For years now, we have heard and seen how this or that politician and this or that community leader would talk about the latest crime wave; and thereafter the chatter would continue.

And some thug would go to another low in barbarism. In at least one instance, a man and his wife were so thoroughly and disgracefully brutalized and tormented that the press censored itself.

As a consequence, the attentive public was denied an opportunity to know some of more luridly pornographic aspects of that exercise in hate-magnified, sadism and drug-addled dementia. And so the beat continues: out of touch, out of mind.