there is a lack of collaboration

For March 23rd, where we as the island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin celebrated the Treaty of Concordia, I had an entire piece laid out on the importance of collaboration and how it can better our island, especially as one people. Unfortunately due to circumstances, that project wasn't able to be done.
But then, I was thinking to myself, having a conversation about the current state of politics on the Dutch side would’ve made my Treaty of Concordia day post look very hypocritical. As Toontje said on episode 8 of the We Talkin’ podcast, Sint Maarten is full of hypocrites and after doing some reflection, I might as well be one. How can I sit down and scream for a proper working agreement with another governmental entity when we don't work together within hours?
This piece is a call-out on everyone. A call out to those in government, parliament, the “media”, the ones that live on Facebook, and myself. 
As the grandchild of educators, I like to define words before explaining how they can be used in my arguments. Today's word is the verb collaborate, in which the noun and adjective will be used throughout this piece. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, collaborate means: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.

Now that we have defined the word, let's discuss the situation at hand. It is obvious from the last three weeks, maybe almost a month, that there isn't a collaborative effort amongst our lawmakers who are willingly wanting to put Sint Maarten first. Yes, everyone has different ideas, approaches, and even agendas but isn't the “uniqueness” of our society and how we all grow up with each other and xyz means that our legislators, all 15 (well, 13 ½) of them, could sit down and work together for the greater good of the people? Right? 

As we can see, apparently not and unfortunately this has shown me the lack of collaborative effort within our legislative hall. From those who are in the coalition together, to those who are opposition members. A lot of the conversations, grievances, and misunderstandings that take up a lot of the time on the floor of parliament, can be addressed in a WhatsApp message. Yeah, it makes good reality tv, and interesting background noise during zoom classes and meetings, but it doesn't get the job done. 

We've been yelling and arguing about the money we have or the lack of money on the island. I want to make this clear statement. There is money on the island, there isn't money for the island. We see many articles and reports stating that the world's rich are getting richer. So why can't we apply this same logic to our 16 square miles? Covid-19 has shown to the common man how exploiting “big money man” are and the lengths they go through to do such. The big money man in our context is a list of people, from the Dutch to the millionaires on the island, our “established families” and even a good bit of our members of parliament and the government. In figuring out how to collaborate and figure out how we are going to feed the people of this country, we have to look at ALL the big money man, understand how the class system has pushed us into high levels of poverty, and look at how as legislators and members of the executive come together and work together.  

Now you might tell me, but Kamilah ain't da wa the petition doing? No, it's not. I'm not against the idea of the petition but as my good and I came to the conclusion the other day, the lack of collective effort on the petition from members of parliament, the government, and input from the people of Sint Maarten has made it into a weird situation where for a long time people who were on board couldn't properly explain what was happening in the document. 

It gives me this is our group project but only one person worked on it so when the teacher asked another student to answer they have to make up something to sound reasonable and that's not good. The solution to the lack of collaboration that was mentioned above actually has a conversation with each other. Not a “hey we are going to work on this.'I going to check on you later *thumbs up emoji* but an actual dialogue across the board to come up with actual solutions so that the next time a disaster hits us we do not have to be in this same situation again. 

Lastly, an important factor of being collaborative and having these discussions that will lead to solutions is the use of media and is intentionally having clear and transparent dialogues respectfully. I had to laugh typing the previous sentence because if you've listened to any, I mean any radio interview in the last three weeks, you will be led astray by both the interviewees and the interviewers. This paragraph is dedicated to the folks who get paid by advertisements. The LACK, read this carefully, the lack of professionalism on the radio waves is disgusting. I've always questioned our journalism but this last year has been full of rants with no substance, yelling matches, and a lot of them lying to us and misogyny. Instead of facilitating proper discussions, you are facilitating confusion which leads to unclarity and unfortunately misinformation and that's a violation of all journalism ethics. 

Take a deep breath, Kamilah.

This entire essay can be applied to those who love a Facebook post and rant about the government isn't doing anything but they aren't. This can be applied to those who shrug everything off and live in their bubble having the time of their lives. Change the context from being political to whichever social setting you are in, this can be applied to such. That's why I said this is a call-out on everyone. We talk about wanting different, wanting change but aren't willing to work together to achieve the same goal just because we have different ideas and I don't want to mix my ideas with others. 

​And guess wa. It's a damn shame.