In Search of an Alternative | Clarissa's Blog
I can’t answer directly, and really I wonder if I am still getting over the impact on my being of a major fire in our region which put eucalpyt smoke in the air for a few days (you may have noticed a decline in my spelling during that time), but my observations are that current people in contemporary Western culture have lost sight of the meaning of politics. We could call this the loss of a political instinct. I mean they can’t sniff out power relations accurately. We had a major and devastating bungle in Australia recently, which has ended up with two Australian kids in line to being shot by an Indonesian firing squad in the next few weeks. I view this as resulting from an incapacity to take into account considerations of power on a number of levels…
You may have heard of the “Bali Nine”. Anyway, they were kids smuggling heroine into Indonesia. One of the parents got wind that something was up and notified their lawyer who notified Australian Federal Police. The parent had hoped to stop his son from leaving Australia and committing some sort of crime, The AFP considered it a good idea to immediately notify the Indonesian authorities, who captured the nine and now two have been on death row, scheduled to be executed by the end of this month.
Perhaps I am being overly judgemental, but the decadence of the current Western character probably ought not to be underestimated, for personal safety reasons. These people, all down the track, thought reporting the infringement to the appropriate authorities would produce excellent results. It seems that at no stage did anybody think that powerful bodies of the state also have interests of their own. This indicates a decline in the political instict.
It seems we from the undeveloped world still have a political instinct (for our survival) but those of the contemporary West are like the Eloi. They keep getting eaten and do not understand why.
Even if I tried to explain to them why, they would never understand it.
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