Making sense of it all, the Simpsons way

JAN 29 — I was watching “The Simpsons” today and it happened to be the episode entitled “The Monkey Suit” in which Lisa Simpson, Bart’s much-smarter sister, tried to get her school to stop the teaching of creationism to students and instead focus on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

After failing in her protest with Principal Skinner, she then takes her case to the town hall for the mayor and the people of Springfield to hear her case and make a decision. But her efforts are in vain as they decide to stick to the teaching that supports the origin of life on the planet as told in the book of Genesis in the Bible, thereby outlawing the teaching of evolution.

Lisa then decides to go underground, organising a class after regular school hours to teach her classmates about Darwin and his book “The Origin of the Species”.

As she starts her first class, the door of the room is busted open by Police Chief Wiggum of the Springfield Police Department and his two deputies, guns drawn, arresting a young girl who was just trying to educate her fellow students.

Lisa says something to the effect that “there are harden criminals out there and you want to arrest me”, to which Wiggum replies “we only work based on the last law passed”, which was the one made at the town hall meeting above.

As they are talking, the scene shifts to the Kwik-E-Mart where a machine-gun toting criminal is randomly shooting at passersby from the rooftop. Looking through the window, Chief Wiggum just shrugs and says “ahhh... on another day we would have been all over that scene”.

I just set up the sequence of scenes from the episode exactly as it played out on the TV. The main reason is to illustrate how ridiculous it all sounds.

But that’s “The Simpsons”, a long-running animated show on TV, now in its 19th year, which has always been meant for an adult audience.

Sadly for Malaysians, this nonsensical scenario is actually being played out too much in real life in the past few years.

The police are too busy going around arresting innocent people who are demonstrating peacefully for justice, innocent people (including a priest) who are just standing quietly holding candles, innocent civilians (including children) who are cycling on long-distance journeys, lawyers seeking a better judiciary, a child accompanying her mother to ask for the release of her father and, most recently, mourners marching together at a funeral procession.

Meanwhile, rape, murder, break-ins, snatch thefts, car thefts, pick-pocketing, corruption, assaults and robberies in broad daylight are happening all around us. All the police convenient like to remind us is “the public must help and cooperate with us to reduce crime in our country”.

Yes, it’s a simple point to make and it is also so obvious that most of us now only talk and laugh or lament about it. Therein lies the problem.

This scenario is set to be repeated time and again until and unless all right-thinking people stand up and speak for the rights of all Malaysians to get due protection from real criminals. This is what the police should really be doing instead of having large numbers of police personnel going after innocent citizens peacefully voicing their dissent against the federal government and other administrative abuses.

So, the next time you hear anyone making a joke about law enforcement in Malaysia being a joke or cartoonish, remind them of Chief Wiggum from “The Simpsons”. Think about that, while you read this from behind your desk in the office, or drink your latte in a café at some posh mall in KL, feeling safe when you really are not.