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The British say: "Enjoy your meal", the French say: "Bon appetit" but the Chinese say: "Man-man Che", which means "eat slowly". And while the Europeans take their meals by the spoonful, the Chinese have invented chop-sticks to eat slowly, taking the meat or chicken on their plate piece by piece into their mouth.
My father used to say, that chop-sticks are similar to mine detectors. While picking up food, one can feel whether the cook has left some pieces of bone on which the diner could choke.
But while it is possible to detect bones in food, the chop-sticks are not equipped to detect other dangers, such as cholestrol, glucose, salmonella and lately even more greater dangers such as dioxin. We would need more sophisticated equipment to know whether the food we are eating is totally free of potential hazards to our health. And once detected it would take a lot of time and effort to get them out of our poisoned body.
In Indonesia we face potential hazards every day. Petty crimes occur many times every day and are not difficult to deal with. If the authorities have no time for it, the people in the street will act as judges and beat up the pick-pocket or the chicken thief. Big robberies, although not too often, can be solved in a few days. Our police have also been quite good with solving murders, even when the victim have been cut in 17 pieces and the parts have been deposited all over the city. We must admit that they do have a bit of difficulties with hidden crimes, such as gambling, drug smuggling that sort of thing, but that is only because of the phone calls before the raids with offers that are difficult to turn down. After all, you have to do is to ignore that there is a potential danger threatening.
But there are other hidden crimes that are the most dangerous threat to our society. They can't be considered crime, because there are no weapons, no drugs, or other things usually found in crimes involved, but they are poisonous for society, like the cholestrol and the dioxin for the body. Yet they can be considered robberies, but the money involved remain invisible and all that is needed is a dialogue between two people, either in person or by phone and huge sums can change hands, or rather change bank accounts. Very subtle activities that are difficult to detect even by the smartest detective.
Something similar to expensive laboratory tests in food research would be needed to detect them and even then the results may be disappointing, because after being detected these vices are also hard to eradicate.
We all may have had a share in creating his situation. We may have giving little bribes here and there to smooth up certain procedures, but nobody could know that from these little bribes, greed of such gigantic in scale could develop. We know who the culprits are, but it seems that the cure is not in sight yet, the only remedy we could recommend at this moment is to appoint people with certain allergies, giving priorities to those with allergy to bribes.
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