Perhaps the time has come to look at our own “stationmaster”: at the ease with which people may be authorised to decide, judge, speak and stand for election without meaningful standards of merit—and without a second thought.
Our own “stationmaster” can be found almost everywhere, across much of the country’s administrative and political structure.
The question is what happens once time has dulled the memory. Do we lapse into complacency, as before, and wait for the next “stationmaster”, remaining within the boundaries drawn by party groups and organised political ranks?
These are the places where appearance has overtaken substance; where representation has become identified with successive “stationmasters” who simply fall into line with systemic rules established over many years—rules that have seeped into the way society thinks and acts.
The examples are plentiful. It is enough to turn toward the small “station” closest to us. Becoming a “stationmaster” has itself become an ambition, a pursuit and an achievement—something treated as a reward.
Attention is also due to sections of the media that seek to designate each new “stationmaster”. When their chosen figure becomes involved in an “accident”, they do not hesitate to condemn what is, in effect, their own creation, before moving on to select the next one.
It is time for each person to choose independently and turn away from groups and organised ranks whose sole purpose is to appoint “stationmasters”.
The younger generation should be supported in building, through its own uncorrupted judgement, a code of values that leaves no room for participation in such systemic armies.
This is a final source of hope for the country and a tribute to those who were lost while exposing what is wrong. It is a matter of collective memory and historical responsibility: so that future generations will not have to think about “stationmasters”, but about the roads ahead; and so that they will never have to say:
“And now, what shall become of us without stationmasters?
Those people were a kind of solution.”