They call us dreamers. They call us naive. And some say independent candidates have about as much chance “as a snowball in hell”. But I believe these are the comments of the few who have lost the battle to cynicism. As the saying goes, “Scratch any cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

So let me speak to both the realists who are doing the maths, and the disappointed idealists who are trying to remind us to hope a little less.

I found Phil Perinchief’s op-ed so uplifting and timely that I sat down long after I should’ve been asleep to write this!

He reminded me that we have elders who still remember what is possible. Elders who remember when Dame Lois Browne-Evans and other Progressive Labour Party leaders dismantled the two-vote system. A system where landowners had two votes which ensured that the wealthy — and mostly White — kept power in the hands of a few who thought “they knew best”. It was a system designed not just to govern, but to control the poor and hoard wealth. And yet, here we are, decades later, staring at a new version of the same old game with people who may look like us, but in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “They not like us.”

The landowners of yesterday have become the “safe seat” holders of today — entrenched politicians who do not need to keep their word or earn the people’s trust because party politics guarantees them unchecked power.

What you have in many candidates such as Juanae Crockwell, Ci’re Bean, Omar Dill, Malachi Symonds, Eugene Dean, Suzie Arruda, Lauren Francis and others are people who have been servant-leaders in Bermuda long before they stepped forward as an independent, Free Democratic Movement member or One Bermuda Alliance candidate. We have been serving in your non-profits, in your classrooms, in your firehouses, in your gardens and in your courtrooms long before we started asking for your vote. And many of us are sacrificing our livelihoods and income just to ask for the chance to prove we are ready, willing and able.

And if we are naive, then let us be naive enough to believe that leadership should be about service, not self-interest. If we are naive, then we are naive the way a seed is naive before it breaks through the earth. Or the way a river is naive before it carves a canyon. Or the way a snowball is naive before it gathers into an avalanche. Many of your independents do not stand here empty-handed, waiting to be paid. We have been working, building and planting, sometimes without credit, even when no one was looking. We stepped forward not because we are naive, but because we are ready. Ready to turn wisdom into law, sweat into solutions, and to serve something greater than our own safety. If believing in integrity, transparency and results makes us dreamers, then let us dream big enough to create a government that is brave enough to know better and do better.

Back to Uncle Phil. Can I call you Uncle? (I’m sure we must be related somewhere down the line.) Thank you. I hear the frustration, the guidance in your words, and the warning that this system has long been stacked against us. I hear that the system we inherited is about protecting the same seats, the same voices and the same conversations, while the people outside of it struggle to afford groceries, pay rent, or choose a school that will give their child the best start possible.

But I also hear something else: possibility. Because while some may sell the lie that a vote for an independent is a wasted vote ... that the system is too entrenched to be changed. That adults cannot work together. You and I remember what they forget. History and physics. And that a snowball, when given the right conditions, can grow. And when enough of us gather, what starts as a single snowball can become an avalanche — one that reshapes the entire landscape.

So I’m asking the cynics and idealists, and the dreamers and realists, to be that avalanche on February 18. Because it’s going to take a force of nature for a snowball like me to make it.

Mr Perinchief, thank you for placing your bet where it belongs.

My bet is on the avalanche.

• Tiffany Paynter is the independent candidate for St George’s West (Constituency 2)

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