Where is the justice in this world?

Where is the justice in this world?

Jacinta Hannaford, Contributor, Jakarta

There's nothing like another bombing to get people thinking about
what life means to them all over again.

A few days before the bombing at the Australian Embassy on
Sept. 9, life to me meant university applications and going out
with my friends, partying. You know, the typical teenage
expatriate world.

Today, it means university applications, going out with my
friends and the steadily mounting fear that it will all be gone
tomorrow. It's a fear that has accumulated each year since the
9/11 attack on the Twin Towers.

And there is also a desire to find out who really is to blame.

Funny how an event like the bombing means your world stays the
same, yet is changed forever, even if you weren't physically
affected by any of the tragedies.

And that is even in small ways.

Before 9/11, I never used to acknowledge my sister at school.
After it, whenever I saw her, I would go to give her a hug, or at
least wave at her.

Before 9/11, I never watched the news. There were no "good
guys" and "bad guys", except for in movies. I never gave a
thought about who I would give my support to.

Now, I am constantly thinking about the "good guys" and the
"bad guys".

The "goodies", as many people like to call them in movies, may
actually not be people who are stereotypically good. For example,
those often self-declared "religious" people.

It was an issue raised in the movie Chocolat. The mayor of the
town drove himself crazy trying to impose his beliefs and ideals
on an unconventional woman, who was, so he came to believe, an
evil person trying to bewitch the little town with her chocolate.

Sometimes we strive so hard to make others believe what we
believe that, in the end, we employ immoral methods to impose
those beliefs, becoming the exact opposite of what we set out to
be.

Stereotypically, anyone who is religious is a good guy because
they try to be the best person they can be. Chocolat disagrees
with this; the mayor was a highly religious person, yet he was
depicted as the bad guy for his overzealous ways.

So, being religious doesn't make you right or wrong. It
doesn't make you good or bad; it's our actions that do that.

To me, despite his self-appointed fight against terrorism,
U.S. President George W. Bush is as much a bad guy as, say, Osama
Bin Laden. I'm not exactly sure why I made this identification --
maybe it's because, like terrorists, he sacrifices innocent
people's lives, whose only crime was that they were in the wrong
place at the wrong time.

Recently I've been obsessed with trying to figure out who the
"good" and "bad" guys are. I mean, if I see Bush and his
supporters and Bin Laden and his supporters are as bad as each
other, then who goes where in ?

The other day, I was expressing my frustration about the
bombings to my friend who lives in the UK. What exactly did the
terrorists gain by killing innocent, nonpolitical people? In the
past, if rebels wished to remove a leader, that was what they
did, but they did not intentionally kill civilians.

My friend dismissed it by saying "Muslims will be Muslims", I
am ashamed to say.

I couldn't believe I was hearing something so flippant,
stereotypical and hateful. It was as though it didn't matter that
so many people were suffering. I hated that she was being so
judgmental.

And I am willing to bet that most of the people who lost their
lives on Sept. 9 were Muslims.

My quest to distinguish the evil-doer from the protector of
good was becoming muddled, not clearer.

Maybe it could be distinguished between the fight for
democracy and free will against iron control, as Bush says. Of
course, as if programmed, when I thought of the word "democracy",
my mind immediately turned to the United States. After all, it is
the face of democracy, so to speak.

People value their freedom, and freedom of speech is seen as a
basic human right. Thus America and democracy are the goodies!
Case solved!

Not really. Think about it; how democratic is the U.S.,
really? I mean freedom of speech? I almost laugh out loud at the
idea that Americans think they have dibs on freedom of speech.
Didn't the Dixie Chicks get condemned for opposing Bush about the
Iraq war? Although it is true that they weren't thrown in jail or
killed for it, they still felt the heat for speaking out.

Then I realized that I was complicating the whole issue with
too much analysis and logic. I had known all along whom the bad
guys were.

What the terrorists, of all allegiances, do is wrong. No
matter what they are trying to achieve, it isn't right to take
someone's life in such a pointless manner. Why must people be
punished for doing the things they do every day? Where is the
justice in losing your life for that?

-- The writer is a final year student at the British
International School in Jakarta.