Is there any cure for a sick society?

JAKARTA (JP): We Indonesians like to eat with our fingers. Eating with our fingers may seem a little bit barbaric to some who prefer to eat with a fork and spoon. My friend Hans even thinks that just eating with a fork and spoon is not enough, because for him, to eat in style means to eat with nothing less than silver forks and spoons.

Whatever his reasons, eating with your fingers or with chopsticks, which can be seen as extensions of one's fingers, may have its positive side. While eating, we can feel the potential dangers in the food, such as pieces of bones, staplers, satay sticks, etc. We can detect them before we put them into our mouth which could cause us to choke.

But while it is possible to detect tangible dangers in food, fingers or chopsticks are not equipped to detect other dangers, such as cholesterol, glucose and salmonella, which, at present, are considered to be great dangers to one's health. Lately, food researchers have found even greater dangers, such as mad cow disease and dioxin, which we had never heard of until recently.

We will need more sophisticated equipment to find out whether the food we are eating is totally free of these potential hazards to our health. And once detected, it will take a lot of time and effort to get them out of our poisoned body. Another hazard may come from the patient's side. They may deny their complaints and thus impede the examination process.

In Indonesia, we face potential hazards to our social well- being every day. Petty crimes occur many times every day and are not difficult to deal with. If the authorities do not have time for it, people on the street will act as judges and beat up the pickpocket or chicken thief. They may strip people who have committed adultery, and have them parade naked in the streets.

Big robberies are no problem at all. They can sometimes be solved in a few days. Our police have also been quite good with solving murders, even when the victim has been cut up into 17 pieces with the body parts deposited all over the city. They have found fetuses, hundreds of them, all resulting from abortions, but the only people dragged before the courts are the doctors and midwives who performed them, not the women who underwent them.

We must admit that they do have a bit of difficulty with hidden crimes, such as gambling, drug smuggling and that sort of thing. But that is only because of the phone calls before the raids with offers that are difficult to turn down. After all, all you have to do is ignore that there is a potential danger looming. Besides, the offers may be so attractive that it would be stupid to turn them down.

Similar to the cholesterol and dioxin, the largest crime, the most dangerous threat to our society, seems to slip away from the best detectives. The reason is probably that it is not considered a crime, because there are no weapons, no drugs, or other things which are usually found at crime scenes. All that happens is a dialog between two people, either in person or by phone, and huge sums of money can change hands, or rather change bank accounts.

However, as similar also to the situation in our sick body, expensive laboratory tests in research are needed to detect it, and even then a cure may still be far away, because after being detected, the vice is also hard to eradicate.

We all may have had a share in creating this situation. We may have given little bribes here and there to smooth up certain procedures, such as at the immigration or customs department. The civil servants are the lowest paid employees in the country and they need money to feed their children. But how could we have known that from those little bribes, a greed of such magnitude would develop? We know who the culprits are, but what can we do when they vehemently deny and hamper the examination procedure?

The problem is that while Indonesia gets sicker and poorer by the day, these culprits are getting richer and richer.

-- Myra Sidharta