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Personally, I believe there are two reasons why public outcry is too late.

The first reason is obviously a matter of timing. There is no public outcry until after an event has taken place; because, the public does not know about it so that they can make an outcry.

So many things are going on in our world, that events do not even get our attention until after something bad has happened. Until we see groups of people being executed by military troops on the evening news; we do not know it is happening. Until we read a book or story about "female circumcision"; we do not even know that this mutilation is being performed on millions of women. By the time we find out and raise an outcry; serious, irreversible damage has already been done.

Also, the perpetrators have a tendancy to hide their actions. They do not do these things in public.

When a foster parent locks foster children in cages at night and starves them every day; this is not done in public or in front of the social workers tasked with monitoring foster homes. But, when a child dies as a result of this treatment; the abuse does come to light; and, then the public wants to know HOW we could have not noticed this problem and what we are going to do about it.

Foreign governments do not come out and publicly declare that they have come up with a program to get rid of people who disagree with their government. They just quietly cut off support to towns and villages; they burn crops and towns; and they start dragging people off to prison or force them into work gangs and/or the military. It can take months or even years before refugees escape to tell their stories to the public.

The second reason is simply that people don't want to believe things are "that bad". They think that some people are just "alarmists" and are blowing situations out of proportion.

Global warming is an excellent example of this. We knew that pollution was harmful ever since the Industrial Revolution and the first factories started pouring out pollutants into the air and into the water. But, it was more than a century later, that even the skeptics had to admit that we now have a planet that is warming up way to rapidly to be ignored anymore. Now, we have an outcry; but, the damage to the environment has already been done.

Another good example, is terrorism. Terrorists were kidnapping, bombing, and killing people for decades before 9/11. But, the public didn't really think much about it or consider it a serious threat. After 9/11, the same terrorist groups were suddenly seen as a serious threat; resulting in a major public outcry and forcing our governments to admit that terrorism is a serious problem. It is still too late for all the people who died or lost loved ones. But, no one took the threat seriously before 9/11. Most people just could not believe that terrorists could or would do such things.

So, I have to say, that there are two reasons public outcry comes too late: we don't know about the problem soon enough and we disregard the seriousness of the problem until the damage is excessive.

Learn more about this author, Ginger Kazay.
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