From time to time I enjoy an odd episode of “JAG”.

The one I’m gong to tell you about now presented Harm Rabb and those around him with the classic dilemma of which comes first, the very ‘palpable’ individual member of the community or the distantly hazy but “extremely important” ‘common good’.
In the end even the self important CIA ‘common good-er’ rallied to the more mundane task of saving a child’s life at the expense of a longer range operation and this apparent change of attitude from the ‘CIA’ somehow raised my hopes that maybe ‘they’ are starting to get it:

– First of all that sacrificing yourself for the common good is heroic but sacrificing somebody else for something that you, or even an impressive crowd, consider to be of any importance is callous. Even more so if the sacrificed is innocent or the sacrifice is made against his wish. Does anyone remember of Baal, the hungry god in whose mouth young children were thrown to be engulfed by flames in the hope that the satiated Baal  will stop tormenting his worshipers?

– Secondly this kind of operations usually backfire, even if for the moment ending in apparent success. Regular Joe, while not always as quick as it should be, figures out eventually that in these cases there always are two kind of people, who do not mingle. The ones who select those who get sacrificed and those who get the ax. And that he, Regular Joe, is always among the latter.

Do I need to remember you what happened in the end to the priests who fed Baal? I forgot that this legend isn’t so widespread… Maybe because the priests were eventually fed themselves to the ‘hungry statue’ and the commoners chose to forget the whole story, somewhat embarrassed for being fooled for so long?