Editorial | Have they no decency?

It is appropriate to paraphrase Joseph Welch, a lawyer for the United States Army at Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist hearings nearly 70 years ago.

Have they no sense of decency?

In this case, the indecent are not in America rummaging around closets to out ‘Reds’ to blacklist as enemies of the state. But they are engaged in a behaviour equally pernicious: the corroding of rational discourse, a coarsening of the soul, gratuitous cruelty and a galloping diminution of ourselves.

Unchecked, the unwitting outcome of their crusade will be the collapse of society and the death of democracy.

The great facilitator of this bludgeoning of the guardrails and the uprooting of acceptable norms is the wanton use of social media. This, as has been so callously on display this week, ought to elicit all-round condemnation, as well as thorough and transparent investigation by the police of their own systems, to determine whether it was the origin of this assault on decency, and the motive thereof.

If, in this case, the law was broken or Force Orders were violated, especially regarding the release of sensitive investigative documents relative thereto, the perpetrator(s) should be made to bear the full weight of the penalties.

POLITICAL TROLLS

Apparently, at some time in the recent past a child of a politician was, or may have been, the victim of some form of sexual abuse – seemingly sexual touching.

The good thing is that the child was sufficiently conscious of the inappropriateness of the behaviour by a person of trust, that the incident was reported by the child to its parents. The matter was reported to the police.

The fact of this complaint was reported by the radio station Nationwide News Network (Nationwide), without naming the child or the parents of the minor. Some people might argue that by disclosing that one of the child’s parents was a legislator narrowed that person to be among 84 people, thus making it easier to identify the child, potentially undermining the protection offered to children in these circumstances.

However, Nationwide would well, with validity perhaps, argue that there was legitimate news value in its report, and that it did enough to protect the identity of the child.

And if the children and families are not safe, then who is? Which is a reasonable debate for the society to pursue, and for the media to robustly engage.

There is a difference, however, between serious policy discourse and this careening race to the bottom that too often in Jamaica pretends at political debate, in which there are no boundaries, no rules, no sensibilities. Politics becomes a blood sport, with social media replacing garrison communities as its arena.

What society sheds here is not a cocktail of plasma, red and white blood cells and platelets. Rather, there is a surrendering of decency and an atrophying of the soul. There is no bridge too far.

So, in this case, in the desensitised, uninvigilated world of social media, political trolls, seeking to wring advantage for their tribe, identified the child’s father and the child’s age, hoping to claim ineffectual parenting. That is as good as identifying the child and compounding the child’s trauma – revictimised.

Seemingly, there are no depths too low for this crowd.

FULLY INVESTIGATE

But as egregious, if not more so, than the flippant cruelty of sticking barbs in raw, emotional wounds, is the reported circulation on social media platforms of the statement of complaint to the police by one of the child’s parents. It has not been ascertained if the circulated document is authentic. If it is, this newspaper assumes that its leaking and circulation was not done by the child’s parents.

It is not an irrational supposition, therefore, that the document was copied and leaked from within the police force, and from what ought to be one of its most sensitive and caring formations.

The police commissioner, Major General Antony Anderson, has an obligation to fully investigate this possibility and to hold anyone who may be responsible fully accountable.

But to go back to where we started: the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s that ruined the lives of many Americans. Senator McCarthy was seemingly unstoppable, until he encountered Joseph Welch at a hearing at which he launched an attack on one of Welch’s young colleagues, to which Welch responded: “Little did I know that you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to this lad … It is, I regret to say, that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Those questions are also appropriate for the trolls of social media. McCarthy’s crusade soon collapsed under the moral weight of Welch’s searching observation and questions.

This newspaper does not expect, nor hope for, the collapse of social media or discourse thereon. We do hope, though, for a sense of decency – at long last.