Letters | Hong Kong protests and the vicious cycle of anger: how much more can the city endure?
The protests have been going on for more than five months now, but I’d been able to travel without a problem all these days, until last week. I always get upset by the disturbing scenes on television every day of Hongkongers trying their best to make the government heed their demands. We can’t really tell how the protesters are feeling, since most of their faces are behind masks.
Last Wednesday, I went to Tung Chung MTR station for some bank work. The station was closed and confused people were trying to find their way out. All the shops in the adjacent mall had shut. Since I could not go to the bank in Citygate mall, I thought of going to the airport branch. I soon discovered there were no buses running to take me there. Next, I thought I would buy stamps to mail a document, only to discover that the post office was also closed.
I then witnessed a most disturbing scene: a boy who seemed to be around 10 years old, holding a long metal rod, with a youth of about 20 holding a hammer, both looking around angrily for something to break. They ended up vandalising a Commercial Press shop that had been covered with wooden boards. One board had already been broken so the older boy entered the shop through that and went on to break the glass wall inside some more.
The sight of these two youngsters, probably once timid and disciplined, shocked me to the core. The anger and desperation they showed will not abate till their goal has been achieved. While returning home, the tears wouldn’t stop as I wondered if those two were the family or friends of someone who had been arrested during the protests.
Increased arrests are going to fuel protesters’ anger as they want their loved ones out of jail and back home.
When is this vicious cycle of vandalism-arrests-more vandalism-more arrests going to end?
Dr Chitra Sivakumar, Tung Chung
Police are neither the cause nor the solution
I don’t see any supermarkets, power companies, large office towers or the property agencies of tycoons or Chinese owners under siege; I only see attacks on their “blue collar” brethren (the police), who are just trying to do their jobs, and the obstruction of ordinary people trying to make ends meet.
Also, the police may be a symptom of government inaction and incompetence, but they certainly aren’t the cause and won’t be part of the solution. If the protesters really want change, they should be brave, show their faces and target the groups who can bring about change.
Peter Jenning, Sheung Wan
Those who can leave at will have no right to judge
It’s easy to look with contempt at destroyed MTR stations, the cancellation of schools and the general disarray across the city. It’s painful to see your childhood mall smashed up and in flames. But to turn those feelings of sorrow and hurt into a condemnation of those with the most to lose is ignorant.
Judgment clouded by too little empathy and too much privilege is what leads to the vilification of the protesters. Violent protests are easy to look down upon. Why be violent when you can just march peacefully, stage a sit-in or boycott businesses?
Members of our society are fighting for their future and basic civil liberties. That desperation is hard to conceive of if you are not in the same circumstance as they are, if you have a way out, if you are privileged. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and this is just mine.
Isabelle Marsh, Sai Kung
