Money-in-Law

There is a constant parade of persons on the landscape outside my office window every morning. Mostly I enjoy watching it when I’m supposed to be deeply soaked in work. It’s sometimes more fun than a carnival. It becomes a nuisance when my attention is too drawn to its variety and intrigues of whisperings, uncertainties and sheer morbidity of humanity trying to access justice without losing too much, while the purveyors of ‘law’ try to squeeze as much they can for what we are told was an originally divine pursuit.

There is one parade that makes me acutely uncomfortable though. That parade of well-dressed men in crisp white shirts handcuffed and moving between the Economic Crimes Court and the Fast Track Court. In the Economic Crimes Court, their charges would most likely include money laundering and causing financial loss to the state. In the Fast Track Court, they would be there for drug related crimes.

That group makes me nervous. Their faces can usually be found in the business class section of flights. They enjoy money more than they are able to legitimately make it. So much exceedingly and abundantly more. So how could they care about how it comes? It could be at the cost of a whole community losing their gifts and talents in the swamp of poverty because public officers took chunks of the budget meant for schools.  Or previously and potentially productive people reduced to dragging on drugs.

Or worse, a nation eating dust in unpaved markets surrounded by garbage because toll payments were not used to pay for whatever they were supposed to be used for. Or worst, children breeding intestinal worms because their fathers receive payments on behalf of their institutions and find the need to run a private shop with the income flow instead of accounting for the inflow. Whichever way, the public coffers remain empty and society suffers.

Anyways, as long as this group can wear starched clothes, drive big cars, sit in big houses, laugh in big restaurants and wear bright jewelry, it doesn’t seem to matter to them who or how many get hurt.

Hmmmm…..I just saw a particular gentleman through my window. He looks familiar! I wonder whether I know him from school, the news or church. Wherever. He was handcuffed in a crisp white linen shirt and well pressed trousers. Headed towards the shrine of purgatory after a life of feeding fat on the forbidden… Lead us not into temptation.