In Continuum.

Absurdity

There are times when people do something in life; people do something which they think is right. Logic and common sense tells you that everything is going to go wrong from the very start, but you haven't the ability to tell that person to do otherwise, because that person has absolute power. So you watch this train bear its way down the railway track with a crack in the rails, and you await helplessly as the passengers close in on their impending doom. It's not like you could have stepped in with your bare hands to stop the train, and that person we mentioned is standing at the head of the train and smiling at you. He wants you to have some faith in him; he wants you to believe in whatever he is doing. However, how do you believe in a person when he toys with this little thing called 'Politics'?

As much as possible, I try to avoid the evening news. If news are supposed to keep us up to date with the latest happenings around the world, is it really necessary for us to know that there is another family killed in a raging fire, another man murdered for two hundred dollars by the side of a petrol station, or even a father who raped her daughter for the past fourteen years? There are news that we need to know, and then there are others that should be kept under wraps altogether. I'm not saying that we should be ignorant to our social conditions, but there's always the power of media at work, whereby the viewers are cultivated to think that our society is worse than it actually is. After all, the nature of a news is like a capsule of sorts, whereby the information are all crammed up into the one hour slot and fed to you like pills. With the bulk of news compressed together, we tend to think that our society is going to hell with all the kind of images we see. However, with every twenty percent decrease of crime rates in the States, there is a three hundred percent increase in news coverage. So you see, the news isn't really the news anymore.

Anyway, as I was saying, I try to avoid it as far as possible. The family turns on the television and switch it to the news channel for the sake of background sounds, because there are times when the family becomes too engrossed in the meals and forgets to have conversations over the dining table. Once in a while, our ears catch news that interests us, while there are the other times when they make you choke on your rice. Two weeks ago, I heard a piece of news from my homeland Taiwan that caused me to throw a slipper at the television screen despite that absurdity of the action. However, compared to what was going on on screen, my slipper-throwing stunt could have been seen as being civilized.

The newscaster was going on about the release of prisoners in Taiwan, not because they have finished their sentences but because the government took their time to revise all the sentences of the current prisoners in Taiwan, and have decided to release three thousand odd prisoners prior to their release dates. So there they were, walking out of the prison with their hands carefully shaved and walking around in flip flops, cheering and laughing at the top of their voices. Some of them praised the incompetent president, shouting into the camera about just how lucky they were to have such an idiotic president managing the country. But most of them took cover behind the mosaic, unable to face the lenses of the cameras and the rest of the world. So these people are back on the streets, roaming the dark alley ways with their thirst for drugs, money and blood.

Just yesterday, a college professor was on his way to school when he was stopped by a man by the side of a road. When he wasn't able to produce enough money at hand, he was beaten up and bashed to death by bare fists. There the professor laid by the side of the road in the early hours of the morning, until motorbike riders found his battered and bruised body. It was already too late when he was sent to the hospital, and her smallest daughter was the first person at the scene, making frantic phone calls and waiting outside the emergency room for a sign of miracle.

But the miracle never came, and the college professor whose passion was in biology, died under the bloody fists of the person who assaulted him. Pictures of him was plastered all over the television screen, pictures of him wandering through the forests and studying life samples of animals and plants. He was smiling in those pictures, and it was difficult for me to imagine that same man by the side of the road. For some reason, I thought about Stanley laying in the drain at four in the morning, perhaps in the same battered and bruised manner. Only, the man who ran over Stanley is still very much at large, nobody ever caught that man for what he did to the dear friend of mine.

The man was caught in the end, and he confessed to the murder of this teacher. Driven by his need for drugs and without money to purchase them, he tried to get it from the poor professor who just so happened to be in his path when the need came along. This same man was part of those bald headed criminals that was released earlier than their original release dates. Two weeks on, and the first innocent life lost because the incompetent government made a mistake that could have been pointed out by a five year old as being completely stupid. I mean, they were in prison for a fucking reason, you don't just get their asses out behind bars just because you deem their sentences to be too harsh all of a sudden - as if the laws in Taiwan are too harsh in the first place.

In the course of four weeks, fourteen of the three thousand prisoners have already died - believe it or not. Most of them died from drug overdose, alcohol overdose or natural causes. Another dozen already committed crimes like armed robbery and others. Most of them did whatever they did because they didn't have money, or the ability to find a new job in the society. Either way, they were all desperate man running about on the streets, and it's not like it was a mistake that could have been mended at all. It is not right to release these men and have them arrested all over again because you made a mistake in the revision. How many more innocent lives like the professor must be lost before somebody comes up on national television and apologize for their stupidity? I know that an apology is not going to bring the dead professor back, nor is it going to bring the other two thousand odd prisoners back into custody. But that is the least that the people are asking for right now, and I don't see anybody doing anything on the news as a form of apology at all.

It is easy to put the blame on the criminals that roam the streets now. It is easy to say that these people are the culprit, these people should be the ones at fault. However, put yourself in their shoes. With a mistake once committed in your life, how easy do you think it is for them to start all over again? Crimes are the kind of stain that can never be washed off, and you don't expect yourself to come clean on paper once you step out from the prison cell. It remains with you for a long time, and it is probably not going to go away anytime soon just because your mentality has changed - if it changes at all. It is hard for these people to fit in, and most of them are definitely going to commit the same crimes or worse, once they are released.

As they always say, a desperate man is a dangerous man. You can never expect what they are going to do to curb their desperation. You don't expect a man that is on the verge of his desperation to have any rational thoughts, because that is not going to happen at all. So they resort to stealing, robbing, or even killing to temporarily satisfy themselves. We condemn such acts in our society, we do not encourage the above mentioned crimes and so much more. However, we do understand why they did it, we know why they were driven over the edge to do the things that they did. It's like a man killing his wife for cheating on him, and is being sentenced to death in the newspapers. It is easy to understand why the man did it, while at the same time condemning such acts altogether.

The true villain in this picture is the government, the party that did whatever they did with no apparent reason at all. It's not like their revision of the sentences were logical in any form or ways. There are no excuses out there that could have justified what they did in the first place. I think there was somebody on television one day, saying that the prisons are running out of cells, so it'd make sense to decrease the sentences of the prisoners. That is probably the dumbest thing ever to have been said on national television. There is something about politicians that disgusts me - and probably a whole lot of other people as well. They have the ability to say the dumbest things and get away with it. Corruption is one thing, but outright lies are worse. With their idiocy, they have the ability to look into the camera and say the most preposterous things possible. Like the act of reducing the prisoners' sentences, you just have to ask yourself," What the hell for?"

There are times when I am proud of my roots; when I can tell people where I came from. I love my homeland, the culture they have and the kind of upbringing that I received from the people who was immersed in that very same culture. However, there are times when politics are brought up in a conversation, and you can't help but to run away from everybody and dig a hole in the ground for you to hide in it. When your country is governed by people who are dumber thank donkeys, proclaiming the love for your country is probably not the best thing in the world to do.

There are a million different ways to run a country properly, but there are a million more ways to ruin the country altogether. I am not going to tell anybody what to do with a country, because I am not in the position to give such suggestions. However, the thing that I am certain of is that releasing a bunch of criminals back into the society and have them slaughter innocent civilians to gratify themselves is not what a good government should be doing. The right winged people are going to argue that it is not as easy as the ABCs to run a country proper, and it is easy for them to point fingers at people such as myself, and call us the procrastinators. However, it doesn't require basic kindergarten common sense to know that it is not the right thing to do, now does it?

If you are going to be an incompetent government, fine. You can sit back and not do anything for the country, sure. But let's not worsen the situation by making retarded decisions all the time. You are not going to gain any respects by doing so, and it is certainly not going to help when your support is sinking below twenty percent in the country. If election is all that you care for, this is not the way to do it at all. If you are going to pretend to care for the country, pretend. If you are going to act as if you are doing something for the people, act. Stop putting up a half-fuck job and expect us to think that we are going to be blinded like fools. The twenty percent of the country supporting this retarded president may be blind, but the other eighty percent have our eyes sharper than hawks and ears sharper than foxes.

If the next election comes up and ruling party is going to win again, I am going to stop telling people of my nationality altogether. It brings shame not just to the country but to myself as well. I am not a person that is particularly interested in politics, but when it spills into the lives of civilians, you just can't help but protest. This is my protest, this is my voice. It is not going to be heard by anybody, but at least posting it made me feel better about the country of mine that is going to hell one step at a time.