"I don't think anybody's necessarily ready for death. You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you've said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out in mid-sentence." -Johnny Depp, in Esquire Magazine, January 2008

And so, like it or not, the Big Conversation continues; even if it has to look for a while like a monologue. All attempts to derail it are doomed to failure; indeed they are doomed to becoming themselves an integral part of the Big Conversation. Get it?

Some days ago, America and the world celebrated the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who in 1963 declared (and both Bermuda and Sir Henry Tucker will have heard him at the same time) that "there is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny." There were a number of "new Negroes" growing up Bermuda at that time as well. Some of them are leading us today.

They too had their own "new sense of dignity and destiny", in many ways passed on by an earlier generation who, as they were required to do by virtue of the circumstances of their time, behaved a lot differently.

With the exception of Dr Gordon and his determined "Gordonites", the black Bermudian reaction to the indignities and injustices of "old Bermuda" consisted of a mix of docility and fear on the part of most and covert action on the part of others.

Covert action was of particular significance and had long lasting effects, if only because those engaging in such activity sought anything but credit. In researching this piece, I learned for example that at least the Richards family, and I think it should be all of Bermuda, will in October of this year note, if not commemorate, the centenary of the birth of the late Sir Edward Richards, Bermuda's first Premier. (Sir Henry Tucker was "Government Leader"; the office of "Premier" came about in 1973, two years into Sir Edward's tenure.

I discovered, having re-read J. Randolf Williams' biography of E.T., "Peaceful Warrior" and spending some considerable time in the archives, that Sir Edward's covert and behind-the-scenes actions in support of the efforts of his friend Dr. E.F. Gordon were ultimately indispensable to the Bermudian struggle for freedom and democracy.

Neither the trade union movement nor the PLP would have been formed, at least not when and how they came about, without E.T.

Yet, despite a valid and unstoppable defence, Sir Edward never chose to put paid to some pretty horrible attacks upon his person, character and motivations upon becoming Party Leader of the UBP (and Premier).

He had witnessed firsthand, after all, the physical and mental decline of Dr. Gordon who, some have argued with considerable force, died of both a broken heart and spirit, not so much because of the attacks upon him from "Front Street" but mainly because he had come to realize that he had vastly overestimated the reliability and cohesion of the Bermudian workers of his time.

The other side of that coin is of course the fact that black Bermudians in general can be credited with having displayed apparently endless degrees of patience in the face of some pretty bold assaults on their dignity.

I recently heard an elderly white Bermudian lady lament that "race relations were so much better in the 40s and 50s" and I understood why, at least from her perspective, she genuinely and sincerely believed this to be true.

So, let us deal directly, first of all, with one or two clear misconceptions regarding the more probable consequences of the UBP folding its tent, and calling it a day. First, it is absolutely inconceivable that Bermuda will ever again be a one-party state. As I said before, "nature abhors a vacuum"; and Bermudians of all hues will never allow this island to return to oligarchic rule as in days of yore.

Bermudians of all hues also know the value of free expression and peaceful mass protest; as well as the dangers of concentrating too much power into too few hands. This is particularly evident within the ruling PLP, a political organization which has already amply displayed a penchant for challenging, and changing, leaders with frequency. For this reason alone, you can forget any notion of Bermuda becoming a "dictatorship". It simply cannot happen. We are not built that way.

Secondly, the country is in no danger whatsoever of becoming a Labour-led, proto-communist or even doctrinaire socialist political economy. Some of us, and I happen to be one of them, lament very deeply the apparent PLP tendency particularly since the death of L. Frederick Wade, to forget that the Party was actually meant to be "the political arm of the Labour Movement", as Dr. Gordon and the Founders had envisaged.

The notion of a true partnership between the working masses of Bermuda and our government may well have to wait for a few more generations, or perhaps a major catastrophic event before becoming reality. And again, if truth be told, it sometimes seems as though the word "Labour" no longer has any real place within the party's moniker.

That's my view, anyway; and I would welcome arguments to the contrary. Increasingly, in terms of political ideology at least, the two current political parties are distinguished primarily by the identities of those who appear on their front lines, and certainly not by political beliefs or ideology.

It's not quite as bad as Tommy Vesey recently suggested, but his argument that the PLP candidates may have "looked better" than the UBP array may well have something to it. The election certainly had little, if anything, to do with ideology.

The total disappearance of the UBP from the political terrain could therefore both free up the white community and free up all of our minds.

Who knows, we may end up having a real set of ideological choices when next we go to the polls. US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, an African-American, said recently that he views with pleasure the apparently increasing national acceptability of his quest for the highest office in the land as proof that "people can change; and each successive generation can create a different vision of how we should treat each other."

As I said at the beginning of this piece, and which is, surely, axiomatic, "everything must change".

The crafting in 1964 of the UBP as "an overcoat" against the "east wind" that consisted of the end of segregation, the rise of trade unions, the advent of universal adult suffrage and the creation of the PLP represented that generation's vision of "how we should treat each other".

It was hardly a perfect vision; but there is much evidence that it was a vision based upon a sincere desire for survival on the part of the white Bermudian political and economic leadership; and, more importantly, it was regarded as the key to Bermuda's own survival and continued growth as an economy.

At the same time, it was an extremely divisive and inherently cynical vision. It remains divisive to this day; and Bermuda certainly reached its nadir in late 2007. The vision which created the UBP was arguably so inherently divisive that it is virtually impossible to distinguish the dividers from the divided.

And so it is that both parties pursuing victory in the last election campaign agree that it was a divisive election. But no one agrees on who did the dividing. The answer is that it was the system itself. The system devised in the House that Jack Built.

If the election campaign of 2007 taught us anything, it is the simple reality that, as a society, we are clearly not well, not well at all. There is a collective madness in play here, with dangerous portents if we do not take a serious look inside ourselves as a society.

Freedom of speech is, I think, a wonderful thing and perhaps the most noble of pursuits; a right worth dying for in the appropriate circumstances. But some of the hatred and venom that was spewed forth in the run-up to this last election, particularly amongst certain bloggers and letter writers, was clearly well beyond the boundaries of acceptability.

The time has come for our professional commentators, particularly media journalists charged with the responsibility of giving us the "news", to finally accept the futility of trying to micromanage the future by rewriting history as it happens.

We now face entirely new challenges; and some of them are truly formidable. We must accept that years of racial abuse, deprivation and denial of dignity and unequal social and economic justice had created by 1964 a Bermudian community in which there was more than enough room for hypocrisy, communal self-delusion, deception, cynicism, and in the emerging party political context- an excess of crass opportunism.

This has all become habit-forming, if not addictive. As a community, we need nothing short of an intervention.

The ongoing (and ultimately successful) attempts to marginalise the PLP by declaring it to be nothing more than "a black party" had always the dual effect of keeping whites (even those who were labour-oriented in their personal political philosophies) well away from the PLP and the Labour Movement; and of separating the black community (and indeed black families) into bitter name-calling factions. It also had the effect of pulling the PLP well away from its ideological roots as "the political arm of the Labour Movement".

At the end of the day, the 1964 model for Bermuda is simply no longer either applicable or appropriate to the current generation of Bermudians or to the future Bermuda.

The United Bermuda Party, in its current form, has become little more than an alternative PLP, with no discernable ideological difference, save for the dubious and unproven claim to a higher sense of integrity and a more sincere adherence to the goal of "good governance", whatever that is.

We really must move on, Bermuda. Real leadership requires nothing less.