Politics, Excution Squads And Why How Things Are Framed Is Everything!
Grrr!
Let’s get really, really angry at the Indonesians. They killed two of our citizens.
How dare they! I mean, the death penalty is wrong, isn’t it? (Unless you’re Derryn HInch who’ll be arguing for it and telling you that most Australians are behind it, according to a recent poll of people who are stupid enough to listen to his program.)
Ok, I’m trying to back up here and work out – not just how I feel – but also what I think.
Mm, it’s terrible to hear that two young men who seemed to have turned their lives around and were offering a lot to their fellow prisoners were executed for crimes they’d committed almost a third of their lives ago. Yeah, I can probably get pretty upset about that.
And I certainly don’t support the idea that they were responsible for the deaths of heroin users because they were the ones importing it. After all, if we go down that path, pub owners are responsible for a significant number of road deaths and a fair amount of domestic violence. And yes, yes, I know that one is a legal product whereas the other is illegal. And yes, they should have known the consequences.
Yes, we can certainly bat this back and forward over the dinner table, with some people applying more spin than a Chinese ping pong player.
I read about how we need to try and eliminate the death penalty in our region. I look at the front page of the Murdoch paper with a painting of the Indonesian President and the suggestion that he has done something terrible by carrying out the death sentences.
Yes, I think, he should have granted them mercy. But I also know that when they were sentenced to death, there was precious little protest then. Was that because we could accept their deaths, before they’d had the chance to rehabilitate themselves? Or simply because we didn’t have a front page figure to blame?
But I also can’t help but wonder about the selectiveness of the paper’s outrage. Why are we not – for example – suggesting that we can’t possibly enter into any treaty arrangements with the USA while they execute such a high number of their citizens? Why are there suggestions that we boycott Bali, but not Mcdonalds?
Is it that we care more about the lives of these two Australians?
Or is it that we’ve been told who to get angry at? And rather than asking the sort of questions that may actually stop this happening again, we’d rather just find someone to hate, because that’s the easy thing. (She’s a witch, burn her!)
Yeah, we shouldn’t question our WAR ON DRUGS and taking a tough stance; it’s only Indonesia that have gone too far. Like Baby Bear’s porridge and other possessions, we’re always just right.
In spite of the UN protests, the executions went ahead. I guess the Indonesians, like Tony Abbott on asylum seekers, were sick of being lectured to by the UN…
“No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”John Donne
