provide us with an enviable way of life and most Bermudians were happy to welcome our guests. About ten years ago things began to change. "Look after the visitors'' began to fade as our primary concern.

The natural progression of successful tourism was that we educated our young people well and, quite understandably, the price of success was that they no longer wanted to do service in the hospitality industry. At the same time, along came international companies and they supplied good, well paid, office jobs but, largely, these jobs were taken by Bermuda's high achieving women.

International company jobs removed them from contact with Bermuda's visitors where they would have been very impressive.

In the process, too many of Bermuda's men were left behind and took menial jobs, often in the visitor sector, where they failed to find fulfillment. The result was that they began to believe that tourism had little or nothing to do with their lifestyle or their wallet.

Some of the blame for this stems from the fact that Bermuda has never done very much to explain to Mr. and Mrs. Bermuda the value to them of visitors or to make it clear just how dollars from visitors get into everyone's pockets, not just into the pockets of those directly employed in the hospitality industry.

Because of these factors, there are alienated people who feel that tourism has nothing to do with them and they can treat visitors any old way they like.....insult visitors on the street, harass them on cycles, rob their rooms.

But there may be something much more important here. Bermuda may be undergoing a cultural change in which its people are moving away from a service economy.

The national psyche may have arrived at a point where Bermudians generally no longer want to be in the tourist business.

Well off, well educated and now very much middle class because of visitors, many Bermudians see themselves as above working in the hospitality industry.

Thus they seem to be developing a certain disdain for tourism and are beginning to view visitors as something of a nuisance and something of an inconvenient intrusion in their lives.

All of that, of course, is easy with full pockets and a good lifestyle but that lifestyle would be impossible to sustain with only the international company business. Tourism and international business are closely tied and tourism is the major cash industry.

If this brief and simplified analysis is correct, Bermuda has a much deeper tourism problem than just improving facilities, controlling prices and getting visitors to come to Bermuda and have a good time.