Tuesday 18 November 2008

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I feel physically, vilely, wretchedly sick to the point where words feel too delicate and airy to actually describe the repulsive feeling. The death of Baby P. How he was trained as a dog by his mother's murderous boyfriend. Trained to kneel on the floor waiting to be punished. The baby lived in a house where human faeces and rat infestations were a normal reality. Where he awoke everyday to a mother who slept routinely till lunchtime not bothering to even acknowledge him, let alone tend to him, breaking his spine like he was the piece of plank from Karate Kid, spinning him on a chair till he came crashing down to the floor. It's excrutiating to read and listen and fill your mind with this. As my husband just told me to stop it, 'I don't want to hear it.' But that's it. We don't want to hear it. We don't want to see it and tomorrow it's another disaster we've ascribed to anomalies of evil in our developed, technologically advanced society.

The Baby P media focus has been quick and harsh to point all the blame on Haringey Social services, who admittedly tripped up badly having not dealt with this case promptly despite all the clues. However this is a very easy scapegoat. A palpable, graspable organisation we can all hound on. Purge our grief on and then walk away tomorrow brushing the dust off our hands. And this is why it's Baby P today, Sharon Matthews kidnapping her daughter yesterday and so many other children being sacrificed due to a bigger problem that yet has not been identified.

Forget the peripheral organisations who have this minimal capacity to try and monitor people and their behaviour; let's actually ask the golden question - Why is it that it is so normal for our society to produce the likes of Baby P every so often, such examples of human irresponsibility, cruelty and utter eradication of the difference between right and wrong? Do we not ask why? Do we not ask what have been the consequences of us living in a culture and society which values as its cornerstone the freedom to lead our lives as we please, accountable to nothing and no one, living for today, forget what happens tomorrow. A society where pleasing our sensual desires becomes the paramount goal in life, like a sniffer dog lured by its goldmine; over all need to construct our lives by a higher calling.

We're not animals. We're mammals with a mind and unless we use it to differentiate ourselves from animals, it seems that society will become a jungle of battling desires and disasters. Let's please begin to point the finger in the right direction. That human beings are made up of a mixture of desires, emotions and particular natures. If we are left to decide for ourselves how are life should be, such cases are inevitable and as we are seeing, are becoming normal. For all those who believed a society based upon Islam was a dilly dallying daydream, I ask do you really still think so? Are you really still happy to settle for this quagmire we now live in? Set aside all the scapegoats and please, I beg of you, just contemplate the realise the viscous, wretched jungle of anguish will we see if we sit back and just passively wait...

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