The price of "progress"

Reading this headline was shocking and disturbing enough.

China executes ex-food and drug chief

Then the journalist who wrote this report spends one paragraph talking about the injustice and excessiveness of killing this man.

"His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record."

Which is just peachy, of course, because then the Chinese leadership doesn't have to take responsibility for the fact that it is their cynical, repressive leadership that makes such corruption so likely and that this execution just entrenches and reinforces that same ugly cycle.

One paragraph about how the state killing this man was "heavy" and the rest of the article seeming to justify his execution in the name of safety concerns?

Eye for an eye, I suppose. How ugly.

I don't think I can handle anymore of this progress. The world has seriously gone off the deep end here in the last few years. It's not just the execution that bothers me. It's the fact that this journalist spent one paragraph talking about the human rights abuse that occurred here and that I can see so many people nodding in agreement, "He got what he deserved."

Then this from the Carl Minzer at the Council on Foreign Relations in a May 29th, 2007 International Herald Tribune editorial.

Corruption in China: The anger boils over

"For the past two months, local officials in the southwestern Chinese province of Guangxi have pursued a harsh campaign aimed at enforcing China's population planning laws.

In order to meet targets for allowable births, they forced pregnant women to have abortions. They threatened to demolish homes to make residents cough up fines demanded for excess children.

This month citizen anger boiled over. Thousands of angry rural residents took to the streets, smashing cars and sacking government offices."

The Chinese government claims that it didn't want to use harsh measures to force women to have abortions. They wanted to give incentives to enforce the law that women have abortions to enforce compliance with their population control measures. What nice guys, huh?

Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. Rebellion often breeds greater repression. Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. And so the cycle goes, on and on and on and on until we decide to break it.

The price of progress is getting pretty high, these days.

Bit by bit, we chip away at our souls. Soon enough, we won't have souls to sell off, at all.

We got to get this turned around.

Love,
Ben