Can’t please everyone…

Satiricus sighed. He’d so much hoped that all this confusion and bad blood over Linden would’ve ended with the Report. But such hope hadn’t even lasted a day. Seems that the Report has only stirred up the ants’ nest where the residents must’ve been only resting. And waiting. But Satiricus had long suspected the commissioners weren’t going to be able to please everybody.
That became very clear during the hearings – which Satiricus covered for his day job as a scribbler. The venom and the bitterness was so thick when the lawyers for the opposition and the victims were doing their cross-examining, it could’ve been cut with a knife. Satiricus wasn’t surprised when NoGel Huge lost it completely when he cross-examined that police fellow.
In Satiricus’ book, when you can’t please everyone, you follow the advice of the old crooner Frankie Avalon and “please yourself”. That’s what the commissioners seemed to have done – looked at what had been presented to them and did what they thought was ‘just’. And that’s what they were hired to do in the first place, weren’t they?
So here we had the victims and their representatives – and the PNCEE complaining bitterly that ‘they wuz robbed’ in the compensation given. In the case of the PPP, they’d gotten ‘wood’. Seems that maybe some jumbie had torched their buildings. Now Satiricus was a great fan of justice and all that for the underdog. He loved reading about those settlements reached by juries in the USA when millions of U.S. dollars were awarded for ‘wrongful death’ and some such injuries.
But his wife had reminded him that in every one of those cases, the party that had to cough up the dough had to be proven guilty. And in the cases of murder, they had to be proven ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. Here, the police took the rap for the killings and injuries only because they’d been shooting at the time. Were their bullets found in any of the shot victims?
Now Satiricus wasn’t any great shakes at all this lawyerly stuff – but he wondered why the police should be given the blame for the shootings without any evidence. And the government had to pay compensation to the victims. Why couldn’t the PNCEE collect from the organisers? After all, their followers were the only ones lighting fires on the bridge.
But to make it worse to Satiricus, the commissioners had blamed the organisers for breaking the law to encourage the protesters to occupy the bridge – ultimately causing those deaths! Satiricus noted that the commissioners had firm evidence that the organisers had encouraged unlawful behaviour. They should’ve paid for all the arson in Linden, shouldn’t they?
Satiricus shook his head to clear the cobwebs – but they wouldn’t go away. He concluded that maybe this ‘justice’ business was beyond him. That’s why his father hadn’t sent him to law school.