Johnny Barnes is a Bermudian icon.
A local legend.
I would even go so far as to say that he’s among the most famous people in this modern island's history.
After all, he’s the only one who they'd ever built a statue to while he was still alive.
And they built it seventeen years before he died.
I don't think there is a single person on this island who doesn't know his story.
And yet, it isn't because he was a war hero.
Or wealthy, or powerful or something like that.
He was a bus driver.
A normal guy.
They gave it to him because Johnny Barnes loved Bermuda.
He loved Bermudians.
Some would say that he loved them so much, it was crazy.
One day in 1986 Johnny Barnes stepped out into his country’s main traffic artery,
started telling Bermudians that he loved them.
That god loved them.
Every Bermudian at that.
He chose a spot that every single car crossing the island has to pass, and he made sure that
every single one of those vehicles got their own individual blessing.
During busy times he was rattling off those I love yous almost as fast as his mouth could make them.
Which is not, I suppose, the average choice for a retired man with a wife and a home and you know all that.
But this was his calling.
Pun very much so intended.
I think in a big city a man like Johnny would go unnoticed.
Men like him often do.
Well, perhaps not unnoticed, but unappreciated.
He’d just blend in to all the other questionable people yelling at your car.
You’d likely never know enough about this man to care.
And don’t feel too bad about that.
There are plenty of people in cities.
It would be impossible to care.
It's just Bermuda isn’t a city.
There’s bare sixty thousand people here.
It’s incredibly small.
It's half the size of Disneyworld.
You could walk it tip to tip in like six hours, coast to coast is only ten minutes.
So Johnny wasn’t just some anonymous face in the street.
He wasn’t a statistic.
He went through school with many of the people he was waving at.
People would know his family.
The longer he stood out there, the more his misdeeds, his secrets, his abuses,
they just became cross-island gossip.
Because people knew him.
But the more people shared his story, the deeper he became a part of the world.
Outside himself.
Outside of the individual that he was.
And after a few years, he was as much a part of the commute of Bermuda as the road itself.
If he didn’t show up one day, people would talk about it.
They'd ask.
They'd call in the news.
What’s up with Johnny?
Is he sick?
All he ever did was stand there.
But he still mattered to people.
He became a part of their lives.
A barometer of things feeling normal.
A backdrop of everyday Bermuda that everyone could reference.
So naturally, the longer he stood there, the more he became this symbol that everyone could go to.
Like a local attraction that was uniquely Bermudian.
The sort of thing you could tell a tourist about that would feel like secret inside knowledge.
And after standing there for over ten years, as I mentioned at the start of this video,
they got him a statue.
Local businesses got together, not even the government.
And they said that this guy was a part of their culture.
It didn't matter that he was poor, it didn't matter that he was,
I suppose as you could say socially considered crazy.
They even gave it to him before he died.
They didn't wait until he was long out of people's memory.
This was something that mattered to Bermudians then.
They gave it to him before he retired from waving.
He was waving next to a statue of himself.
Well, I suppose not directly next to it because they couldn't erect it where he stood.
I mean he was still standing there waving.
So instead, they erected it around the corner just up the road.
It was still within sight of him.
But he was still there.
I mean seventeen years he waved within sight of a statue of himself.
A statue that I think you could only ever find in a place as unique as Bermuda.
It's the sort of thing that requires a society be rich enough to put up a seventy-thousand dollar statue.
Small enough to notice a man like this, but also cohesive enough
to treat him with the respect of his value to them as a people.
It's the sort of society that I think most of us are aiming towards.
That we envy.
Because that’s the thing about Johnny.
He existed here because he could exist here.
He elsewhere too.
There is many people like him.
But in Bermuda people took the time to notice.
They almost had to.
He was right there.
In the centre of everything.
He was their one.
And once they they noticed him, giving them love all day in his own unique way,
perhaps it was only inevitable that they’d show him love, too.
Johnny is an interesting symbol because he says we can all be noticed.
We could all be a part of our society.
Just as long as we dedicated our entire life to being it.
You don’t have to be a perfect person to be in love.
You don't have to be a perfect person to be loved.
Sure, the impulses that drove Johnny to stand on that roundabout don't exist in most of our minds.
But that doesn't mean they can't serve as an example.
You don’t need to destroy the world to be remembered by it.
All you have to do is to say I love you.
This is Rare Earth.
No, Carmen! Don't lick it, please! Carmy!
Yeah, you can look at it. But licking not necessary.