Go Local

Police systems are tricky little buggers. Creating one already means that you will need to walk a fine line between what is "right" and what is "wrong". A friend and I struck up a conversation with someone at the train station this past weekend about this very situation. He commented that if you are in trouble, the police in Geneva are some of the most helpful people. But you would never want to be on their bad side. Switzerland has such a good reputation for saftey, he said, that they are extremely vigilant in looking out for the smallest of disturbances. This tension is only hightened during events such as the Euro cup.

My views on the results of this system is that you generally have a very safe public space. On the other hand, I wonder to what lengths the police are allowed to go to in order to protect this feeling of saftey.

Perceptions of the police system vary by country and even by populations within countries. So the question is: how do we promote just law and order without creating runaway police systems? The average citizen shouldn't need to carry around a pocketbook of rules of what police are and are not allowed to do. By the same token, police should not have to go to extreme measures in order to protect the general peace.

Maybe the system works in Switzerland because of the size of the country. Smaller community systems can agree on social norms and police themselves faster and better than larger systems. Police systems at the federal level (FBI, etc.) are out of touch with the average citizen. But everyone always knows what is going on in their local neighborhood.

So where is the ballance? How can we create safe spaces where conflict resolution means dialogue before handcuffs? One would think that humans would have figured this out by now. Yet we are so surprised when we find communities that have achieved real democratization.

Everybody talks about an increasingly globalized world, but I would propose thinking on a more local level. We need to think about how we can live locally in a sustainable and peaceful way without creating huge power systems at a federal level that are largely unchecked by their consituencies. Police system aside, it is a fact that Switzerland has not joined the EU because its voters opt to stay independent. The director of the SIT program mentioned that the Swiss vote 4 or 5 times a year. Furthermore, Bern cannot impose policies on any of the Cantons (states) without approval through direct voting. Perhaps there are faults to this system that I have not been able to fully explore, but it seems like a pretty good idea.

We need to keep creating systems that can call the populus the base of their power. Decisions should be made from the bottom, not the top. A top-heavy country may be able to go global as a powerful "influence" in world affairs, but this has never been successful in the long run. And with a resource bottleneck in our midst, going local is even more important. This is not to say we should not travel and interact beyond our borders. All it means is for us to spread power and governance to the local level.




On another note, the Geneva music festival was quite stunning. I listened to salsa, techno, and some type of drum-reggae (by far the best) all in one weekend. Also played some soccer by the lake and went for a swim afterwards. Took me a bit to get use to the semi-nude lawns by the lake but hey, to each his own. And, however detrimental to your body it may be, there is nothing better than the feeling of the sun, no? Actually, this point of semi-nude lawns relates quite well to the differences in openness between Europe and other parts of the world. My host mother and I had a small conversation about how Europeans do tend to dress more formally than Americans, but they keep significantly more intimate inter-personal relationships with aquaintences, even in the workplace. But that is a conversation for another time.

For the Euro cup: go Spain.


Rosh