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By Hilbert Haar
Wow! No royal decorations this year for St. Maarteners. Not a single one. What happened? A lack of suitable candidates? Did we simply miss the deadline for submissions? I have no idea but I could think of a few excellent nominees like Binkie van Es, Tadzio Bervoets and Melanie Choisy.
These people would have been my favorites but maybe they already have such a decoration. Who knows?
I have studied the process our RODAC, the Royal Decoration Advisory Committee, has to go through and I discovered that there are actually deadlines. Anyone who has kept an eye on the way we establish our national budget knows one thing for sure: we are, to put it kindly, not good at meeting deadlines.
Is there a solution for all this royal misery? Of course there is. Some people – a minority, but still – are craving independence. If these people want so desperately to be independent, why not say goodbye to colonial royal decorations as well?
I have an idea for an alternative that I will call The Handcuff Awards. There are no deadlines. Hurray! One problem solved. To qualify, nominees only need a valid court verdict for any crime. That should be easy.
The Governor will present the awards in the Pointe Blanche prison in front of a rowdy audience of disappointed inmates who did not make the cut because they were already incarcerated before the introduction of The Handcuff Awards.
Had the system been put in place sooner, among the early recipients would have been people like Theo Heyliger, Frans Richardson, Maritsa James-Cristina and Silvio Matser.
It is noteworthy to mention here that the design for The Handcuff Award comes from the archives of a visionary driftwood-artist, the late Gerard Bijnsdorp. He cut handcuffs from the wood of a tamarind tree that was illegally felled by a contractor for electricity company Gebe that needed the space for a transformer unit.
This way, Bijnsdorp foresaw how crime and community could come together in a meaningful way; he also saw it as a warning to criminals that have not been caught yet.
With the introduction of The Handcuff Awards, RODAC does not have to worry about deadlines anymore because the Court in First Instance will do their work for them. And don’t worry: candidates will be waiting in line because, as our history shows, we have never suffered from a shortage of fraudsters, embezzlers and thieves.
All we need now is a bunch of politicians that are courageous enough to make The Handcuff Awards a reality. One piece of advice: don’t hold your breath.
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