Stupid primitives

2003-05-26 - 8:24 a.m.

So, a little girl was kidnapped, possibly sexually assaulted, and then brutally murdered and left by the lake here, recently. It's transformed, as these sorts of situations always do, the streets into dangerous territory, and its awakened the most primitive instincts in people. Primitive isn't necessarily bad: no child should have to go through what that girl did, no parent should have to go through what those parents are, and no community should have to deal with this, either.

Primitive protection, though, is so frustratingly stupid. As in dull, dim, unintelligent.

Someone on the radio has said that the parents have started an arm-band initiative in their community, telling the children that any adult wearing an agreed-upon arm-band is "safe." Is that not the stupidest idea ever? It's like telling kids that only grey vans driven by strangers are safe to get into, except that a counterfeit arm-band is probably easier to purchase than a grey van.

To any aspiring parents: the -only- people your kids should be told are "safe" are their parents. ONLY. It's not a fair rule, and it goes counter to kids' natural ability to trust anyone with the right kind of smile, and it risks making them into paranoid, anti-social cave-dwellers, but we live in a world where no other rule will work. Arm-band policies are for people who -want- their children to be abducted.

The other primitive stupidity comes from the mob mentality, the "we have to attack anyone who might have been involved. We have to break rules and dissolve barriers to get our revenge. Justice and the law takes too long, so let's do it our way."

It's a hard fact to realise, but one of the prices of freedom and rights and justice is that, every now and then, little girls are going to get abducted by bad men, and will get hurt badly. Right now, we can't change that rule.

I'm for longer sentences for convicted sex offenders, but I am not for their right to freedom being taken away after their sentence is over. I'm okay with genetic information being used in criminal cases, but I'm against people (not just convicted sex offenders) being told that they must give their DNA or be considered as a suspect.

If people want to give up their freedom and privacy in the hopes that it will stop horrible things like this from happening, I can understand that. The thing is, horrible things will happen, they will always happen, and despite how much it hurts us, there is nothing we can do about it. If laws are passed, if freedoms are curtailed because of this or other tragedies, there will be -more- tragedies, and we'll have given away something precious.

There isn't anything to do about the primal reaction of people who've been shocked and horrified by a violent crime. The mob mentality is as human as anything else, and the desire to stop this sort of thing is vital to who we are as moral creatures. The best we can hope for, maybe, is that we can start being a little less stupid. One arm band at a time.

Cheers,

The Magus

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