CALL it soul erosion, for want of a better term. Just as wind and water are forever degrading Bermuda's topsoil, so too do other irresistible, almost elemental forces act on and deplete its human ecosystem.

The socio-economic chasm that has opened up between the off-shore financial services industry and the overwhelming majority of Bermudians still employed in the residue of the tourism economy and its satellites ? primarily retail ? continues to grow.

The average salary in the financial services arena now tops $125,000 annually; the comparable figure in the tourism-related sector is stalled at $53,000. So it's clear to anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of multiplication that Bermuda's internal inflation rate has mushroomed far beyond the official figure of four per cent. Genuine cost-of-living wage increases fixed to the unofficial inflation rate would, of course, bankrupt every tourism-related employer in Bermuda. Overnight.

So inflation, generally defined as too much money in pursuit of too few resources, is likely to continue accelerating at a speed a super-charged Lamborghini would be hard pressed to keep up with. Those who enjoy two-and-a-half times the purchasing power of the average Bermudian will incrementally continue cornering the market on the island's too few resources.

This ever-widening gulf is viewed as well nigh unbridgeable by a growing number of Bermudians. The cost of living is continuing to connect with an increasing number of Bermudians like a haymaker somewhere between the solar plexus and the hip pocket.

So instead of continuing to overextend their finite resources, instead of committing themselves to lifetimes of what would amount to deficit spending, they are moving. To Canada and the Caribbean. To the US and the UK. To wherever they can find a quality of life that is no longer achievable in Bermuda, to wherever their taxes pay for quality public services that are no more than distant memories here now.

In recent years Bermuda, which for generations has imported foreign workers by the gross, has quietly come close to becoming a net exporter of its own people. Thousands of Bermudians have decamped in recent years. Everyone knows at least one individual or family who has upped stakes. In a reversal of the usual story behind economic migration, Bermudians are packing their bags and selling up not because of pervasive poverty but because of a top-heavy concentration of wealth.

Most Bermudians are, of course, content to allow the small-change of public life here to assume disproportionately large dimensions in their minds while blithely ignoring the more pressing socio-economic realities around them. But a small and consistent minority are voting with their feet, self-exiling themselves from a mid-Atlantic Paradise where the intrusive serpent embodies an ever-spiralling inflation rate rather than temptation.

There are suburbs in Florida, for instance, that boast far more Bermudian residents than similar genteel areas in Southampton and Warwick where all the homes seems to be let on long leases to work-permitted number crunchers with housing allowances that eclipse most Bermudians' wage packets. Transplanted Onions can be found thriving from Beirut to Belfast, from Nicaragua City to Nairobi, a dispersal of the island's all-too-scarce human capital that cannot now be stemmed or reversed.

True, a temporary wanderlust ? particularly among the young ? accounts for some of this outflow. The opportunity to gain international experience in their chosen fields also takes financial and legal professionals to all points of the compass. Some of these temporary Bermudian expatriates do indeed return home.

But many more leave permanently, no longer able to afford to live in the island of their birth, no longer willing to lead lives that amount to latter-day indentured servitude.

This quiet exodus of Bermuda's most valuable natural resource is not confined to any one racial or age demographic. Retirees, who must decide whether their meagre pensions should be spent on food or health insurance because they cannot afford both, are being joined in airport departure queues by two-income families with less disposable income than the average one-income household enjoyed a generation ago.

Young couples who are being forced to choose between educating their children or buying a house are rejecting this brutal Hobson's choice offered by Bermuda and going elsewhere to raise their families.

Almost by definition, those who do choose to begin over again in new environments are naturally enterprising and spirited individuals with a commitment to preserving the type of sound family structure that is going the way of the cahow in Bermuda. Their loss to the island amounts to an ongoing erosion in the bricks and mortar of the middle-class firewall that has long separated the very rich from the very poor in Bermuda. This island's transition into a community of stark economic extremes is being accelerated by their loss.

Given a Government leadership that remains obsessed with the grand distraction of Independence rather than such imperatives as revamping public education or combating crime, it's likely even more Bermudians will be doing private cost/benefit analyses and deciding their futures could be more profitably spent elsewhere.

With the outcome of the last General Election stalemated in terms of the popular vote, a scandal- and coup-rattled Government attempted a flanking manoeuvre around the United Bermuda Party by embarking on an Independence campaign it wrongly anticipated would unify this profoundly fragmented community.

It's precisely the same mistake the UBP made in 1993 following another virtually deadlocked ballot. And it will likely result in the same sorry outcome if a referendum is used to gauge the popular will on this most important ? and irreversible ? of constitutional steps.

With the island's infrastructure fraying and prices rising, Independence barely registers on Bermudians' lists of priorities. An admittedly unscientific poll of readers at an Internet web site this week was nevertheless probably broadly reflective of Bermudian concerns.

Topping the list was crime followed by housing, education and the plight of senior citizens. The economy and the island's increasingly sclerotic transportation system were next followed by environmental concerns, the increasingly strained healthcare system and proposed economic empowerment initiatives. In last place ? below sports (now a sub-set of crime in many minds) ? was Independence, with precisely one per cent of readers naming it as their chief concern.

Presumably the focus groups commissioned by the Department of Communication & Information at taxpayer expense to craft partisan political propaganda for the PLP Government will confirm these findings. The fact is if Bermudians had a simple choice between another meandering television presentation from the Premier on how Independence will bring us together and a test pattern on another channel, the test pattern would top the ratings with the sort of lopsided win normally only enjoyed by Super Bowl broadcasts.

As long as so many in Bermuda's leadership remain so very disconnected from the concerns of those they were elected to serve, the island's soul erosion is likely to worsen ? the accelerated degradation and decertification of the human environment mirroring the sort of barren mental processes so prevalent among our political elite.