Are we safe?

Recently, both the national and global agenda have been full of grim news. A war that has been going on right next to us for more than a year, children being killed, hospitals being bombed, schools being locked up, homes being abandoned, and countless other indescribable pains... 

As if all this pain happening so close to us were not enough, we also face countless atrocities, murders, assaults, abuse, bribery, and smuggling in our own country... Streets where everyone looks at each other with suspicion, where no one trusts or can trust anyone else...

Unemployment, inflation, price hikes brought on by the economic crisis, and what is fashionably called "expensive mediocrity" that has permeated everywhere... No segment of society is happy; let alone happiness, no one is safe! How did we become such an insecure society? How did we reach a point where we cannot walk comfortably on the streets, cannot send our children to school with peace of mind, and cannot board public transport without fear?

There is no single answer to these questions because we arrived at this situation in stages. Whether in justice, education, health, transportation, economy, defense, industry, or tourism, we have slowly decayed; as we decayed, we became insecure; as we became insecure, we decayed further.

Just a few days ago, we learned that newborn babies' lives were targeted for a few thousand TL per night, or that those babies were left disabled for the sake of money; and that the prosecutor who tried to expose the incident was threatened. Moreover, these were real; they were not scenes from a thriller movie or excerpts from a novel! Tiny babies, whom their families protected like the apple of their eye, were being abandoned to death for the sake of greed. Unfortunately, some families experienced this horrific atrocity, which we could not hold back our tears while writing, watching, or reading about. In fact, perhaps—as much as we do not want to think about it—similar events are happening right now somewhere in our country, and families are suffering!

Isn't it terrible? Because of a few malicious individuals, we are now approaching the entire system with suspicion. Because of this gang of evil, how many mothers today were truly able to entrust their children, who needed to be in intensive care, to doctors and nurses with confidence? And did the honest doctors, honest nurses, or all the healthcare personnel who do their jobs properly not feel any pressure or suspicion on them today?

The seeds of evil sown by the so-called "newborn gang" have created such a lack of trust in society that it has raised the suspicion in the minds of people who have had negative experiences in private hospitals in the past: "Were we also victims of a similar gang's work?" Furthermore, the seeds sown by this gang will lead to any essential treatment required for health in private hospitals being questioned repeatedly in the future, or to these treatments being rejected from the very beginning, leading to very serious health problems and perhaps even loss of life. We will experience this and many other problems like it. Because our trust has been broken, shaken, and destroyed.

Regarding such issues that concern social trust, I am always reminded of an anecdote told in law schools and frequently mentioned by columnists for a time. (By the way, the accuracy of this anecdote has not been verified by British courts, but it is frequently repeated in Turkey when issues of justice and freedom are brought to the agenda). I will not break with tradition and will mention the anecdote: A British judge gives a 7-year, 7-day sentence to an attacker who frightened a girl walking in a park one night in England. Journalists ask the judge the reason for this sentence, which is quite high according to the laws. The judge's answer is of a level that will go down in legal history: "The penalty for frightening the girl is 7 days. The 7 years is the penalty for attacking the freedom of British girls to walk in the park at midnight."

For the reconstruction of social trust, I think we also need such judges. I hope the newborn gang receives such a sentence that it never even crosses anyone's mind to attempt such an event again!