THE House of Representatives has recently introduced legislation to open up the Marianas Visitors Authority’s managing director’s position to non-residents and non-U.S. citizens. I am deeply concerned that this move sends the wrong message to our young local people. This concept is not a good public policy simply because it deviates from the more prudent approach of trusting the capabilities of our local capacity. To put it subtly, such thinking does nothing but insults our local people.
The strength of any nation lies in the potential of its most valued treasure—its trained and highly educated human resource. We place our faith and trust in the intelligence and capacity of our cadre of locals who are both educated and trained to assume vital leadership positions. I certainly hope this has been and continues to be the CNMI’s overriding objective when it spends millions and millions of hard-earned tax paying dollars to educate our people from primary grades to college.
Elected leaders, I strongly believe, must continually step up the challenge of truly and sincerely living up to their campaign promises whenever they make education and economic prosperity their platforms. To this end, we must act, not just talk, to preserve our local integrity and prove to ourselves and the world that Chamorros and Carolinians are just as talented and gifted, and highly educated and trained to take on critical leadership positions locally and elsewhere. I challenge our esteemed elected leaders to do what is right and obligatory, and that is to place their trust and faith in our local capacity by allowing MVA to recruit a local as its managing director.
Local problems are best solved when we allow our local people to apply local solutions innovatively. I become uncomfortable when someone else relentlessly tries to transplant and impose their belief systems, lifestyles, and cosmic ideas to a simple island that requires a simple solution from a local individual who possesses a global perspective. Please allow us to chart our own future with our dignity and integrity intact.
It is excruciatingly embarrassing enough to have participated in the past in various tourism promotions by performing local dances only for tourists to find out that non-Chamorro and non-Carolinian dances are being performed in most, if not, all of our hotels. Please spare us further from having the world deal with a non-local when it comes to a group of islands and a distinct culture, customs, and heritage totally foreign to him or her. It is already enough social injustice.JOHN OLIVER DLR. GONZALES
Kagman, Saipan
