A disease of our own making

Boy 'A' used to make all sorts of troubles, be abusive to locals and vandalise properties. So, sometimes people would go to his parents to bring the matter to their attention, or to seek compensations. Whenever parents face a situation like this, the usual practice in our Bengali society is to apologise to the victim, promise them that you will look into the matter. And also thank them for coming to you instead of breaking your child's neck, and finally apologise to them once more. But this lucky boy had the best mother in the world. If anyone came to her with complaints she will be very harsh on them, deny that her son is capable of ever doing such things, and a lot of people have said she would even testify that her son was in the house (one English gentleman also had a similar experience, he told me).

Boy 'B', also had a mother very similar, but he was even worse. He has been arrested many times for theft. If anyone came to his mother with complaints she will start arguing with him or her, deny everything and whenever police came she used to hide him and say she didn't see him. It is no wonder that every time this boy came out of police cell he immediately went back to his usual. Currently he is behind bars for drug abuse, theft and a number of other crimes.

In Bangladesh when the BNP does something wrong, all its supporters look the other way and keep pointing to the misdeeds of the AL. And whenever the AL does something wrong, the exact happens. It is not just the masses; intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, teachers, press; we all are doing it. We support organisations like the AL and the BNP with money, with muscle and we fight for them, kill for them and even die for them. And now we have made them so strong and arrogant that they no longer listen to us and instead they hold us hostage to their demands. They even try to allegedly kill us if we come up with different ideas. Do you still remember the attacks on B. Choudhury and Dr Kamal Hossain by some BNP cadres few months ago?

The question now is, how do we save our lives from these monsters we ourselves have created? Is there absolutely anything we can do to bring them to justice? Personally, I don't think we can. Unlike those two boys, these parties are too powerful for our "deliberately paralysed" law to touch them. It is too late for Bangladesh. And we have only ourselves to blame for this. While they are committing crimes against our country, destroying our educational institutes, killing our economy, insulting our country in front of the whole world and creating panic and chaos in our society with their different political fronts, we continue to support and protect them. Why? Would anyone kindly shed some light on this?