Surrender to Ignorance...

Driving through Moivie Towne the other day I was confronted by vehicles trying to squeeze past a police car going the wrong way so I stopped him and told him that it was a one way, to which he replied as easy as you like "Yeah but I'm the police, I could do what I want."

Under the terms of the State of Emergency I am sure he is right, but then should that be so in a nonthreatening, everyday environment far removed from the war that he and others like him are fighting?

Or is this a case of people, given an extra inch helping themselves to a mile?

Whatever the case, the reality is we ARE where we are because prior to the calling of the State of Emergency the lawless were doing pretty much the same thing and with no explanation or by your leave to boot. It seems that somehow we turned a corner in our development and ended up in a place where most if not all search for opportunities to take advantage wherever the opportunity presents itself, and the law of survival has been rewritten to 'know when to speak and when to shut up.' A bandit on a mission or an officer of the law abusing his power tastes the same in the mouths of the disadvantaged as abuse is abuse regardless of who dispenses it.

This is not to say that I have not taken great pains to see things from the authorities' perspective, it is just that to me a lot that was done leading up to the State of Emergency just does not add up, or, put another way, it only adds up if what you wanted all along was to end up where we are. That we ended up here either accidentally or by design is the same failure to my mind, and regardless of the circular logic and lack of information provided by the Minister of National Security as to the reasons behind the entire exercise, declaring a State of Emergency against your population for no other reason but population control is an admission of failure, and anywhere else in the civilized world convention would dictate that the day this State of Emergency is lifted the government is also bound to dissolve the Parliament and return the power to the people from whence it came. 

Again, I am not making light of the horrible situation we were in prior to and (judging by the lack of any real policies to redevelop the known troubled areas) where we are soon to return, but I, like countless others before and since, have made suggestions, offered time, advice and even service to successive governments who have instead chosen to cherry pick sound bytes to use for their own promotion and ignored the meat of the matter.

To be responsible for a course of events and to affect such course by your actions is to be complicit in all of its outcomes and I hope that that reality is not lost on both the people and the government. At the end of the day and despite how many people are stripped of their rights and terrorized to 'restore order,' this was not the way I would have gone as a first attempt at crime control. We all knew the failed and failing communities, we had a pretty good idea what was going on and why, and we understood that much was to be done to halt the onslaught, remove the drivers of the problem and correct the situation. Instead cheap politicking and sensationalism has replaced effective governance and twenty first century policing, and in exchange for a few lawless individuals and some rusty guns the nation has been reduced to abdicating reason and logic for mediocre results.

I have been saying and will continue to say that whoever advises this government are themselves a handful of fools. You do not burn down your house to rid it of roaches and you do not tear up the Constitution to solve crime. We had and still have all the resources we need to do the job and despite the abundance of bad apples and rogue elements we had and still have more than enough effective, decent, law abiding officers who, properly directed and guided, could have effected the same net results with much less trauma to the citizens and far less international bad press. 

It is said that the most violent element in a society is ignorance, yet knowledge and wisdom exists in abundance and flows in rivers and streams to those who would listen. Having effectively swung the big stick, let us endeavor to return to reason before the cure kills the patient. In a Democracy the rights of the citizens to freedom and expression are more important than treasure, and I would again like to call on the government to bring an end to this State of Emergency now.