Is there any cure for a sick society?
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