Are we reverting to barbarism?
April 25, 2008, 5:31pm, 140 views
Are we reverting to barbarism? I’ve read and heard enough recently to suggest this is a serious question.
On the plane to Perth yesterday I overheard another passenger lamenting the increased amount of road rage.
He said he drives a truck regularly between Perth and Mandurah. On each trip he sees an average of two road rage incidents where there used to be none.
Through my role as a newspaper editor I’ve published more reports than I can count about unprovoked assaults.
I was disturbed to read this report in the Herald Sun:
The son of a Digger walking to an Anzac Day dawn service has been bashed in a brutal attack that left him with a broken jaw.
Victim Ian Carr, 65, of Coldstream, said he was smashed to the jaw and fell to the ground, crawling between two vehicles and onto the road to escape.
Mr Carr was heading to a service in a Lilydale park in honor of his father George, a leading aircraftman from WII, when two youths came out of nowhere, blocking his path as he walked down Clarke St.
The pair asked for a cigarette lighter and demanded a mobile phone. When Mr Carr said he didn’t smoke, one of the youths let fly with a fist.
What’s causing this anti-social behaviour? I’ve got a few theories which I’ll start elaborating on here.
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I have just posted the comments below on the Miner blogs site. What is causing this breakdown in Law and Order? In addition to my commnents in the letter.
JUST SOME EXAMPLES.
1. Working parents throwing money at their offspriing.
2. No need for said offspring to have to ‘earn’ the money.
3. Because of 1. & 2…. The youths respect nothing.
4. Youths will zero life experience buying cars that perform way beyond the driver’s skills.
5. Alcohol is a major problem. One drunken young person - at 10.00am in the morning - SHUT DOWN KALGOORLIE.
6. Violence is acceptable - Just ask Barry Hall or the AFL.
7. The social divide - rich getting richer - poor getting poorer.
8. Lack of any response to 7. by all governments.
Law and Order – or the lack thereof.
I love Australia. I came here over thirty-years ago and I have never regretted it for a single moment. It is a great country and it could be even greater, except that it has problems that it either can’t, or won’t, deal with. I left behind a great country too, but I had seen the outside world and I wanted to see more. There was no going back.
I arrived in Wantirna, Melbourne and I thought it was just about paradise. One thing did disturb me though. It was a quiet Eastern suburb then and maybe still is, but someone gunned down a man in his unit a few doors down only weeks before I arrived. As time went on I began to think that the mobsters were a protected species and I was even more concerned at the big name Lawyers who achieved celebrity status for protecting them.
For the last twenty years I have been in WA and frankly, it seems worse here than it did back then in Victoria. I don’t have the knowledge or education to fully understand the legal system, but then neither do most of us. I don’t feel ashamed of that. We should all play a role to the best of our ability and I try to do that. I do though, in common with most of us, have a good sense of right and wrong and what should be happening.
Parliaments, State and Federal, the Police and the Judiciary are there for us all, but the separation of powers worries me. The Legal profession seems to be a law unto itself: a boy’s club and no amount of horrifying decisions or stuff-ups seem to rattle them in the least. In fact, so frequent are the blunders and travesties of justice that one begins to wonder if they do it to add spice to their lives.
Which of you has not seen on the daily news the parade of criminals exiting courtrooms swaggering and grinning and smoking, followed by devastated parents, families and friends?
The DPP in this state is an absolute joke albeit a very sick one, and the sooner that there is a major shake-up the better. As I have said, I don’t fully understand the system, but I am a decent person and the Dix’s are decent people and the parents of Sofia Rodriguez Urrutia-Shu are decent people and five minutes on Google and I will give you heaps more of people who the so called ‘justice system’ has not only failed, but it has ripped them off.
Do I think that there will be change? No I don’t. I hate so say it because I do love this country, but the spectre of corruption seems a possible reason for the powerful betraying the battlers.
But we, the average everyday Aussies, do care for these betrayed families and I for one offer them my deepest sympathy and my most heartfelt regret that this country and its system has failed them and is failing all of us.
Bill Sullivan