Systems Failure

Rating: 8/10 (14 November 2009)

God didn't make life easy by giving humankind freedom of choice. Unfortunately for man's finite wisdom, he has more choices than he can handle. Unlike Adam who just needed to decide whether to eat the apple or not, modern day man has too many options: 200 cable TV channels, 10 on-line identities, 10 banks, 3 credit cards and for some, 2 families at a time. Everyday we have to make a 1001 decisions just to survive and yet some of these, we can never take back.
And so man has put up arbitrary systems to put some semblance of order and predictability in the world. Justice, religion, ethics, traffic rules are some of the systems, which help guide man's fatigued conscience classify things as black and white. Will you feel safe if convicted criminals can roam your streets with impunity? Can you imagine the chaos when the 10 commandments are only 10 recommendations? Would you use a highway with no traffic rules? Never, you say. But look around you. These may already be the status quo.
In the movie, Clyde experiences a tragedy when 2 criminals murder his wife and daughter. Nick, the prosecutor, negotiates a plea bargain that gets 1 criminal justice but lets the other 1 through the seams of the criminal system. Nick maintains his high prosecution rating, Clyde gets some justice and the public get their thirst for blood quenched for the meantime. Everybody happy? Not Clyde. Can you blame a law abiding citizen like Clyde if he tries to bring down the system to its knees?
The movie reminds us that it is so easy to use systems to justify our actions or inactions as long as it works for us. We silently applaud systems from afar. But during the life defining moments when the system fails us, then we start bending the rules and looking for system loopholes. We erroneously hope that working for the greater good justifies the often convoluted means we use to achieve it.
Bribe a traffic cop rather than spend a whole day getting back your license? Buy a counterfeit designer shirt at 10% of the price of an original one? Drive 10% over the speed limit so that you don't miss an appointment and lose your job? Don't get a receipt so that you don't need to pay the tax? Do a couple of bad things and then confess and go to heaven? Sounds familiar? Hey, it's not your fault, it's the system's failure.
It's the same unbalanced system that allows a rich kid multiple opportunities to earn valuable degrees in good colleges while denying a poor kid even 1 chance to enter the college door. It's the same laws that encourage pharmaceutical companies to engage in expensive research for life-saving drugs only to deny price access to these to the very people who need them. It's the same religious beliefs that justify killing the guilty one to save the many. It's the same rules that allow lawmakers to pay very little taxes and live in luxurious mansions but punishes the automatically-taxed employee who can't pay their loans on time.
What do you do when the system fails you in a very personal way? What do you do when the system becomes the oppressor rather than the protector? Perhaps God, in his infinite wisdom, saw this too and designed life so that no one can ever be as omnipotent or omnipresent or as smart or as rich as God or Clyde. For when that happens, then Houston we have a problem.