August 29, 2011Dear Sir,I do my best to be positive and optimistic because the alternative is just too depressing for my personality to accept… Now Mondays are always tough days for most I’m sure because it is the start of a working week but the fun events from the weekend with friends and family are still ingrained in our minds, making it difficult to reconcile the two competing emotions….So imagine how worse it could become when doing some lunchtime shopping I was given information which made my temperature rise even further for a Monday…. The teller of the story informs me that more ‘hateful graffiti’ has appeared on the walls of our bus shelters two on Middle Road near the Somersfield Academy and the other at the foot of Collectors Hill both areas I know well having grown up in Smith’s Parish. My first reaction was disgust, but I also vowed to not let these nasty messages remain and destroy the Bermudian friendliness that we as a community have built and aspired towards over many generations. As I see it, too many of our people from all walks of life sacrificed so much in prior years to pave the way for everyone in our community to be treated with dignity and respect and therefore I must do what I can to be part of the solution….I left work early and my first stop was the Middle Road Devonshire bus shelters near Somersfield. Sure enough the ‘hate mongers’ wrote “Filipino Go Home” on the walls of these shelters, so I drove on to SAL, bought a spray can of white paint that can be applied to masonry and returned to the shelters to express my own artwork very plain really I just sprayed over the offending words and everything blended in nicely with the white walls of the shelters if I say so myself….The South Road / Collector’s Hill scribe wrote “Attack Filipinos”…and the magic marker print on the plastic advertising board needed a different approach. Down I journeyed to the Collectors Hill Esso Tiger Mart where the staff were most helpful providing me a rag and some petrol which I liberally applied to the nasty words and … voila, they too disappeared… It was a Kodak moment as my smile must have touched each ear…Bermudians were not raised to be mean or unfriendly to others in our community and we must each do our part to rid the Island of the nasty, hateful messaging that is rearing its head. Let’s send our own message to the scribes of these hurtful words that we will not tolerate their rude graffiti on our walls…. Surely these people cannot be Bermudian, because as a people we know better we wouldn’t behave like this. Let’s support the song “Proud to be a Bermudian” and stamp out this nonsense. By the way, I do have some left-over paint to apply should I see such messages again…ALLAN D. MARSHALL JPSt George’s