Made in Macao | Law and Order

Jenny Lao-Phillips

Whenever I look at the messy traffic at the crossroad from my window, I recall a scene from one of my favorite TV shows long, long ago. In that episode, a Chinese goddess who created lives on earth woke up from thousands of years of sleep and wanted to see how her people were doing. Her lover, who had waited for her for thousands of years, then drove her around in a Mercedes convertible. He explained to her the modern technology human beings have created over the years and how they make lives easier, and travelling a lot faster. Then he stopped at the traffic light. The goddess asked, “Why do you stop suddenly?” The lover explained, “See those lights. They are call traffic lights. When the light turns red, one must stop, so pedestrians can cross the road.” Then the moment that left a strong impression on me was the reply of the goddess: “So, do you mean that people will hit another human being with their cars without the traffic lights controlling you when to stop?”
It may be true that advance development of a legal system represents civilization and the level of development of a nation, but are people in the modern world overtly dependent on rules and regulations to guide our behavior? Not that we often see cases when cars would keep going without stopping for pedestrians without a light or zebra crossing. But when traffic lights are down, there are always serious traffic jams with cars stopping in the middle of crossroads not letting each other pass first.  A picture of the chaos we would be in without rules and regulations to guide our action.
I have observed that, more and more often, instead of “putting the fear of God” in their children as parents used to do, or say, modern parents tend to “put the fear of the law” in their kids.  It is not unusual to hear parents in Macao telling their children not to steal or fight or litter on the street because, if they do, policemen will come arrest them. While that is not untrue, wouldn’t it be better to explain to children why they should not steal or kill, instead of focusing merely on the consequences? Anyway, parents have their freedom to decide how to teach their children. Perhaps they decide to leave moral education to the schools.
However, there are cases when parents are depending on the law too often to control the behavior of their kids instead of teaching them the right behavior. For instance, when children start screaming in a nice restaurant, causing their parents embarrassment, they would tell the kids to stop screaming, or else, policemen will come to arrest them. Once, I even heard a mother telling her kid that he needed to go home and finish his homework fast, if not, policemen would arrest him. Now, that is a bit over the line, what do policemen have to do with children not doing their homework? And what will a nation of people turn out to be if our behavior is merely controlled by the fear of the law? What is there to stop us from killing someone if we know we would not get arrested?
It is important for a nation to have a good legal system to protect the rights of its citizens, and it is always easier to control people’s behavior by setting up rules, regulations and organisational policies. But there is a difference between someone who treats everyone equally for fear of being sued for discrimination, and someone who is fair because they respect that all human beings are equal and all lives are equally valuable. Jenny Lao-Phillips