One of Orwell’s famous lines in ‘1984’ “Big Brother is watching you” is the classic ‘art imitating life’ become life itself in a macabre twist.
Fear rules, and in several of our recent federal advertising campaigns, citizens were urged to report anything suspicious to the authorities. All aimed at refugee and imigrant groups, well let’s be honest, Muslims, and their behaviour, because you never know when they might try to enact a terrorist attack. Which reminds me – out of the eight supposedly terrorist incidents reported here in the media, three were found to have substance, and two tragically lead to death (notably, mental ilness was the significant factor and not religion or politics, and certainly not “terrorism”).
Minimizing crime and destruction is a good thing, but there will always be places where you can’t get a clear CCTV picture, or where the dots in an investigation can’t be joined. We have beome focussed on eradicating threat, and in essence we are really trying to nulify death itself, we are pop-insurance junkies. Yes, prevention is a positive ideal, but it isn’t a guarantee or a cure all.
My concern is that we are losing our focus. Feeding suspicion is divisive and destructive in its own way. We need to check our suspicion, what is the driving fear, the motive? Who is driving it? Who stands to gain?
Instead we need to build trust not division. Besides, a trusting community will be stronger than a suspicious community; it will develop an oppenness, a trust, respect and strong bonds, compassion and cooperation, and it will develop resiliance, so that when tragedy does occur, there is a strength to face it together, and not in fear.
Paul,
pvcann.com
parallax 
fear divides and feeds into the authorities need to know everything … trust, respect and integration bring much stronger community bonds but wouldn’t justify the expansion of our law enforcement agencies … know which i’d prefer!
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Yes, a strong case of we all too … 🙂
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It takes a village …
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I love that phrase, thank you, and yes …
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Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und ĂĽber Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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🙂
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Perfect security is not possible, for it relies not on the constant monitoring of those around us, but on the ability to read the thoughts and intentions of individuals.
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Yes, the horror Orwell projected, and inhabited Berlin and Moscow for some time. Ugh.
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Scapegoating comes to my mind, seeing them cameras. Banksy made a great piece of art by one of them cameras with the frase ‘What are you looking at ? “
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love Banksy, yes, interesting insight, thank you.
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