Dear Editor,
I have faith that the vulgarity attending the unjust withdrawal of governmental advertisements from your worthy newspaper must and will soon end.
There is, however, something more immediate, so insidious and so compelling on which I have a moral obligation to speak. It was in all the media as plain as can be. A fellow man with frail human nature like my own, has virtually admitted his guilt of serious public misbehaviour involving grievous assault upon a fellow human being and the abuse of a personal firearm. But this is no ordinary man, he is a minister of the government who sits in the highest legislative forum and occupies a seat in the highest managerial council of this land, the Cabinet. He is an extraordinary man who committed an extraordinary act of lawlessness for someone of his status, and woefully, the political and criminal administration have done him the extraordinary favour of a little pat on the back and saying “business as usual”.
Happily, I do not know the man and cannot accuse myself of personal spite or similar human emotion. But though I worship a God of order and also of mercy, I have no doubt about their relative importance in relation to human behaviour. Those at the helm charged with preservation of national good order have characteristically gone to sleep, confident that this thing will soon blow over like so many other atrocities we have become accustomed to endure. They are wrong!
The main element of this affair, however, that causes sore disappointment is the reaction – or lack of it – on the part of citizens like myself. I had restrained my burning desire to make public comment, awaiting a surge of disapproval from the many sources from which one might fairly expect it. We tend, through weariness, to remain passive under the burden of a multitude of daily irritants and disappointments and now regard them as just a part of life. But occasionally, there is some event that gravely offends our sense of right and wrong and which should jerk us out of our lassitude and move us to arms. This is one such occasion!
These of us who by the kind hand of fate or by personal effort have achieved a healthy level of academic, social, intellectual and economic advancement are the ones in any society who must not fail to pick up the gauntlet at a time of national crisis. We had better recognize the event as such.
The evangelist Luke records the Christ as saying “From him to whom much is given is much required”, a very telling indictment upon all of us. Surely, we, the category just described have been given much and accordingly ought to deliver.
But what have we done after the passing of two weeks? We are content to whisper with another in our courtrooms, drawing-rooms and mostly in secret, words of condemnation taking cowardly refuge behind such feeble excuses as “the rules of our charter or organization don’t countenance the making of comment on this or that kind of thing”. One may understand the reticence of the individual to stick his proverbial neck out in certain public matters, but we blindly ignore the power of corporate comment or representation and thereby deny to the nation the quality and force of representation which, by our training, experience and background we are well equipped to articulate.
Now for the compromise with lawlessness. First, the son of a minister faces the serious charge of causing death by dangerous driving. Compromise! a few dollars, we suppose. End of story! Public reports of a not so gentle man of ministerial status taking advantage of a young female – if true, well, more compromise! In this case a virtual slap to the face of our diligent young minister and her commitment to redress the damage to our youth by the proliferation of sexual predators in our society. Shame!
We men have sheltered for long behind the Mothers in Black on whom we depend to ensure the safety of our roads for ourselves and children. Is it not a time for the men in grey to emerge? Is this not the hour?
Can we really allow the recent atrocity to pass into the night? He has not been called upon nor forced by conscience to do the decent thing and resign as would be the natural course in any respectable society. The officers of the law are praying for the nation to forget. We will not! There are the three licences of which the goodly gentleman by his action must immediately be deprived. The licence to hold a personal firearm; the licence to occupy the respectable position of minister of government, and the licence to walk free as having done no wrong.
The demands both of law and order and of plain decency must be met.
Yours faithfully,
Leon O Rockcliffe
