CRIME. Crime is running rampant. How bad is it? A friend parked their car outside my parents’ house, and they stole, of all things, the AIR BAG! Forget the stereo. They took the air bag because we were informed that some auto shops pay more for an air bag than a state-of-the-art sound system. An air bag?? Are you serious? I hope they don’t find out how much a good kidney is worth on the black market!
The scum who break in to our cars are the same scum who break in to our homes. They are the same scum who traffic and deal ice and try to sell it to our children. They are the same scum who will beg, borrow, and steal to play poker at 3AM in the morning while their children are asleep in their car parked outside. They are the same scum who will blame everything and everyone for their failures and their shortcomings in life without ever once looking in the mirror and taking an ounce of responsibility.
Since our judges are well-known for their compassion and acts of mercy via their slap-on-the-wrist sentencing, isn’t it time we pass legislation for mandatory sentencing? How about a Three-Strikes Law? How about mandatory sentencing for violent criminals? Sex offenders? Drug dealers? Whatever happened to “You do the crime, you do the time”? It seems to have been replaced with, “You do the crime, you say three Our Fathers and three Hail Mary’s and all is forgiven.” We are a kind people, but aren’t you getting sick and tired of having to add barbed wire to your fences and putting iron bars on your windows? IT IS WE, THE LAW-ABIDING GOOD CITIZENS OF THE CNMI WHO ARE BECOMING THE REAL PRISONERS!
HEALTH CARE. That’s a bit of an oxymoron here in the CNMI, isn’t it? Anyone been to CHC lately? Don’t you dare start talking about how lousy the doctors and nurses are. We have some great doctors, and it is sad to see several of them leaving so soon and so suddenly. If you want to blame someone for the sorry state-of-affairs at CHC, blame this administration. While political hiring is on the upswing and every government agency is seeing new faces and new contracts, CHC continues to be neglected. Two ER doctors left at CHC instead of eight. God forbid, what happens if there is a car accident and eight people are rushed to CHC in critical condition? Can CHC handle such a scenario? Hell no. They can’t even handle outpatient care. When we open up a state-of-the-art dialysis center that went from $7 million to $23 million, and no one is being arrested, we know we are SCREWED. Can you say change order via biba koruption? So, we will have a $23 million dialysis center, yet, we still do not have a nephrologist. No big deal. Hey, at least the dialysis center looks nice, and the air-con is pretty cold too!
Whatever happened to PREVENTATIVE measures? When it comes to diseases, it is far cheaper to prevent it than to treat it. How about getting with the rest of the world and passing anti-smoking legislation? The House passed it, and now it sits in the Senate, collecting dust. Why is that? Is it because some of our Senators are smokers? Is it because they think it is anti-business? If they read the evidence presented to them, 99.99 percent of businesses do better when they ban smoking. And to all the bar owners who think it is up to the customer and that they should have a choice of whether or not to go to a smoke-infested bar, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Have you ever for once thought about your worker, who is subjected to secondhand smoke day in and day out? Do not such workers have the right to clean air? It reminds me of the time when I saw an eight-month pregnant woman working in a bar as a waitress. How sad and how unfair, and how shameful that workers like her have no say when it comes to the safety of their heart and lungs. Wake up and smell the coffee. Tobacco kills, and it is a major contributor to all of our diseases and health problems today. If we can’t enact common sense laws that protect the health and well-being of the innocent, then we can forget about progress and change in the CNMI. When I see someone light up a cigarette next to my children and my very pregnant wife, I want to take the cigarette and extinguish it on their forehead for lacking common sense.
Here’s another thought. Why don’t we start treating doctors like medical professionals rather than political hires? How about we treat our doctors with the respect that they deserve? Anyone who goes to school for more than a decade and can save lives deserves a bit of respect, don’t you think? Stop treating them like cattle. They are not here to campaign for any politician. They are here to improve our health and well-being. We give a great deal of respect to our spiritual healers, our suruhanus and suruhanas. Let us extend that respect to our medical doctors. They are not miracle workers, but they have been known to perform miracles when given the right tools and an important thing called REST. Having a doctor work 12 to 16 hours a day? Not a good thing.
CUC. CUC is no longer broken?? I beg your pardon? We rented our generators via Aggreko when we could have BOUGHT brand new equivalent engines for less money. We could have saved millions had we brought in the unused generators from Tinian that we currently own. There were other options on the table, but we went with Aggreko. If CUC is no longer broken, why did we have two power outages in my village last weekend? Why do we still experience power outages? Oops, I forgot. Falling trees! That blasted tangan tangan always gets the best of us.
Supposedly, 53 megawatts of power have been restored, and Aggreko is scheduled to leave in September. How long will those 53 megawatts last? Probably shorter than an ice dealer’s prison sentence (that means less than a couple of months, just in case you didn’t know).
We had a three-day energy summit a little over a month ago. It was brilliant. But what has happened since then? As one of the presenters stated, “There is no magic bullet when it comes to energy.” The CNMI needs to get out of power distribution and open the market to independent power producers, and we need to make sure that any government official who tries to influence or benefit from these independent power producers via kickbacks will be tarred and feathered and caned by every single frustrated CUC customer who has been overcharged, disconnected, and disrespected. Yes, put that in the RFP please, and please allow me to be the first in line.
Historically speaking, the problem in the CNMI hasn’t been a lack of planning. It has always been a lack of execution and enforcement. It will continue to be this way until the day we actually see accountability, transparency, and equality in every corner of our government. Until then, the status quo will always exist and we will always be given change we can’t believe in. I am confident we will see change come November. I’ll bet my stocks in Aggreko on it.
ED PROPST
Dandan, Saipan
