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.