War on… you
Everything’s a war nowadays. In truth, it has been for a while, but a whirlwind of unrelated news coverage over the past couple of days has brought it sharply into focus.
There’s the war on piracy, the war on drugs, the war on paedophiles, and, as ever, the war on terror.
Let me be clear about this: I’m no supporter of piracy, paedophiles, or terrorism. Drugs, certainly, cause a lot of problems ’round these parts (West of Scotland). That said, there’s always a bigger picture. Always.
If we move beyond the shenanigans and dodgy deals and mudslinging, we’re left with a few harsh realities.
First, legislation and policies which undoubtedly have the best of intentions get rushed into force. Critics who cry foul and suggest there may be unintended consequences are silenced and derided as being with them. In the end, everybody ends up at least feeling like they might be in the frame for something or other, no matter how clean their nose is. This is not a healthy way for a modern society to operate.
If you do end up caught in one of the many nets, you can at least comfort yourself with the knowledge that you’re innocent until proven guilty, and that human rights are paramount. Yes, I did manage to say that with a straight face, though typing it out certainly made that easier. None of the political parties want to be seen as being “soft” on crime, and to some vocal sections of society and the media, anybody who’s been accused of something should be given no concessions. The government and authorities would much rather situations where people were wrongly thought guilty than situations were people were wrongly thought innocent — and apology to a victim of the state is a lot easier than an apology to a victim of a theoretical preventable crime.
That theoretical prevention is big news in and of itself. This week, pressure is mounting upon Facebook to install a special CEOP “Panic button” (in addition to its usual “Report abuse” links which litter its pages). All of this is framed in the context of the sad news of a teenager who was killed by a man who lured her into a face-to-face meeting. Is it CEOP who are framing it this way, or the media? It’s not clear. Two things are, though: first, having a CEOP Panic button on lots of sites justifies CEOP’s continued existence even if nothing else does (and that’s not a given, incidentally, but it is worth noting); second, a panic button on Facebook helps somebody in a face-to-face meeting not one jot.
I’m going to go out on a limb here. I’d rather there were paedophiles on the Internet than paedophiles wandering the streets. Of course, modern smartphones mean potentially they could be doing both at the same time. Heavens! I can’t wait for the “paedophiles use smartphones” headlines to hit.
My kids don’t play out in the street, but that’s not because I think there’s a paedophile lurking, or because they’ll take drugs (legal high or otherwise) and die, or fall victim to a terrorist attack (although one did happen a couple of years ago only a few miles away, but that was, y’know, an airport, and it failed), or even be led away by a slightly-older-but-still-a-child killer, because none of these things is particularly likely to happen. It’s because I live on a main road and the risk of them getting hit by a car pales all of these things into insignificance.
Of course, that’s okay, because we’re on the cusp of a “war on cars”, too, especially if fuel duty levels are anything to go by.
The bottom line is this: we — collectively — are not all criminals; we should not sit in constant trembling fear of the next molestation, murder, drug death, or terrorist attack; we should equally not sit in constant trembling fear that we might be accused of being the perpetrators of any or all of these things. The knee-jerk reactions, the wailing hysterical headlines and pushing of dubious agenda need to end.
We need to stop fearing everything, otherwise our kids will grow up fearing everything. Believe me, you don’t want that to happen.
