THIN BLUE LIE - PART 5
We have longed for the
day when our political representatives will actually speak for the masses. When
the people denied a voice will have a champion who speaks for them. When they
bother to focus on the issues that affect us rather than finding ways to fulfil
and satisfy their own self-centred ambitions and desires. But that day seems
unlikely to ever appear. Instead, we must make the most of the opportunity where
they say things that temporarily align with community needs and expectations.
In this
case it is the fact that the Legal System and those that lurk within its folds
(preying upon the most vulnerable to profiteer from their misery by reducing
legal outcomes to commodities accessible, and sold, only to the highest bidder)
are too often so out of touch with the community, not to mention morally and
ethically bankrupt. We are sick of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of
dollars spent on predators who are afforded a presumption of innocence, while
victims are presumed to be liars and receive little to no recompense for their
suffering and a lifetime sentence from which there in no parole or real
recovery.
We are sick
of predators getting off on technicalities, being released into the community
on bail or after only a few years (if any at all) in prison for raping and
murdering women and children, and then reoffending. We are sick and tired of
politicians and celebrities patting themselves on the back for affecting
changes to unjust laws when, in reality, it has little to no impact on the
lives of victims who are denied the basic right to report a crime, who are told
to remain silent, who are denied dignity and justice while the offenders are
free to continue inflicting themselves on the same or new victims.
We are
sick and tired of petty little pissing competitions between authorities who
accuse others of hypocrisy while committing the same sins. Politicians who
accuse the courts of using their authority to threaten and intimidate in order
to “send a message”. Politicians using their authority to do the same while
fighting to assert dominance for the sake of power, while their victims (people
they have betrayed instead of helping overcome injustice) remain powerless with
no means to even share the horrors they have endured.
When the
Legal System is decades behind modern circumstances and consistently fails to
uphold not just community expectations, but the rapidly eroding rights of the
victims, it’s not a matter of political ambitions undermining the independence
of courts and public confidence – those things are long gone. The absence of
justice in the government run Legal System ensures there is no real
independence, as does the failure to uphold even the pretence of equality.
Those in the Legal System have become isolated and insulated from the very
people they claim to represent, so out of touch, they are too often the enemies
of the people.
[Shortly after I finished writing the Blog Post,
those three LNP politicians who spoke with passion and conviction on the right
to free speech, and the public expectation that political representatives
should speak their mind (in representation of the people) on issues that affect
the community, the those men withdrew their comments and apologised in a humiliating
back-down. They suddenly realised that a conviction (in this case, for
contempt) meant they could not retain their seats, and the LNP only held power
by a majority of one. Self-serving desire came first and made a lie of all
their rhetoric and the dramatic claims of representing the people.]
But what
can we expect from governments and councils that accuse foreign governments of
human rights violations even as they themselves run democracy like a business,
cutting red tape to minimise costs and maximise profits, doing the math and
reducing human life to a commodity with little to no regard for the harm they
cause to the most disadvantaged, blaming their own greed and ineptitude on the
poor? Our leaders too often lack the very understanding of what that means, the
example by which they lead setting a standard of moral and ethical corruption
that usually ends only in tragedy and unrelenting injustice.
What
can you expect when those at the top, even in the country that was supposed to
be epitome of the free world, are all too willing to dismiss out of hand any
reports or evidence that conflicts with what they want to believe or, at least,
what they want the public to believe? Our so-called political representatives
are not concerned about representing us at all, only their own self-interests.
What evidence is there? Again, have you ever tried to speak with your political
representative? You can’t. It takes months to get a response, if at all, and
they will go out of their way to make sure anything you say that reveals
problems is buried. You want more? How long has this systemic failure been
going on? Decades.
And if
the media bothers to take an interest in revelations of systemic failure,
corruption, and worse, then political representatives will either claim
ignorance and respond with opportunistic, insincere rhetoric that promises
positive change, or they will attack the media with allegations of ‘fake news’
and then bitch and whine about the media narrative always being negative and
demoralising to the government. Oh, dear, no! The entrenched culture of
corruption and brutal injustices inflicted upon the victims of systemic failure
by piss-poor government has hurt the feelings of those politicians. We should
be ashamed of ourselves!
Hundreds of women and
kids are murdered every year, thousands more ‘surviving’ the brutal violence
and terror inflicted on them by parents, relatives, and occasionally strangers.
But when Islamic extremists went on killing sprees in England, France, and
attempts in Australia, suddenly the media focus shifted, and fed into the hate
and bigotry of ignorant nongs looking for an excuse to inflict racism. Far more
people live in terror at the hands of home grown predators, and rotten police
and public servants, than of idiots claiming they worship some malignant,
psychotic delusion resulting from a lack of good quality education and mental
health services, but our political representatives only seem interested in the
rise in political ratings that results from promises to make sure religious
nutjobs are locked away.
Why do these tougher laws
not extend to the others that do the same thing, who brutalise their victims
with violence and terror, regardless of their claims to some hocus ‘religion’
based excuse for their cowardice? Why do they focus the public attention on one
small element of the community and draw attention away from the bigger picture?
Why do they pursue policies and extremist ideologies that disenfranchise those
already disadvantaged, that compounds the problems that lead to one small
element of society becoming excessively over-privileged, while the majority
suffer deprivation that fosters a festering frustration, anger, resentment, and
even radicalisation that leads to violent crime?
There is an expression
that says “who’s watching the watchers”, but given the current attitudes of so
many in the news media, and the astonishing levels of ineptitude, corruption
and systemic failure, a better question would now be “who’s watching the
predators?” Who’s holding authorities to account when they fail to do something
to end the entrenched culture of corruption in the police, public services,
politics, and society in general? It’s been going on for decades, and yet
nothing has really changed, despite all the rhetoric.
Those that form the thin
blue line are not just the police, not just child safety services and other
agencies, it’s all of us, and that line is a distant outline, lost in the sand
far behind us. Our society crossed it, time and again, until we found ourselves
here, unwilling to look back, complicit in failure because we were all too
willing to follow the official line that there is no problem. How’s that
working out? The story of our society isn’t a bucket that doesn’t hold because
it has a hole, it’s a fucking colander.
So next time the news
media interrupts your day with a “breaking story” on something like Corby in a
pointless update of who-gives-a-shit, ask yourself why they are so willing to
make themselves the news by creating incidents (like botched attempts to recover
abducted children from overseas), but seem so unwilling to cover “stories” that
expose decades of workplace harassment, child and elder abuse, domestic
violence, rape, paedophilia, and the systemic failure that isolates and
silences victims while concealing and enabling predators, crime, the systemic
failure itself, and injustice.
Ask yourself why they are
so disinterested in giving the same dedication to investigation and reporting
they dedicate to bullshit news reports like stalking Corby, to stories about
the thin blue lie, the incompetence or corruption (pick one) of the police and
public services that are supposed to help protect and deliver justice to the
victims of child abuse and domestic violence. Ask why they won’t speak for the
most vulnerable who are denied a voice, why they choose to ignore them.
Ask why they choose
to perpetuate the lies by being complicit in the unending, unabated suffering
inflicted on victims by those who are supposed to help them. Ask yourself why
we, as a society, are so willing to fill our world with diversions, but fail to
learn from the few that may teach us important lessons. The evil in this world
is not just a story or limited to a few sick individuals, it is a many headed
beast, and too many of them are our authorities. The question is, what are you
gonna do about it?
THIN BLUE LIE - PART 4
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