|
I just hope that the "leadership" can act before one side or the other gets carried away with anger.
You cannot have prosperity and progress, you cannot have a healthy business climate or even run a small business without trust for the people you deal with, your government and the political and economic system.
Right now, we don't trust each other or the government. "We," whoever we are, blame "them," whoever they are, and vice versa. "We" presume different facts than "they" do, often not just facts that are different but facts that are diametrically opposed. We talk at each other.
If our disagreements were just about policy, elections would provide a process for resolution, but since we disagree about the facts, we need a process in which evidence can be presented. It needs to be an adversarial process, not just a commission that studies the facts and issues one verdict. We need a trial. The verdict and the sentence, in my view, are not so important.
The problem with past commissions such as the Kennedy Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission is that they were committed to providing an answer -- a verdict. What we need is to have the facts presented and then let people make up their minds about the verdict for themselves. The Kennedy and 9/11 type Commissions withhold too many facts. They just perpetrate the distrust. They increase it.
The process of truth and reconciliation should allow the facts to be discovered, presented and discussed. Just telling those who have questions to shut up, sit down and listen to the answer determined by some group of people this group or that group does not trust in the first place and who withhold facts from us in the second place will not heal our country.
|