Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
January 12th, 2011
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
January 12th, 2011

Queer how things work out, isn’t it: When people snap – when they change sides? Consider the case of PC Mark Kennedy, the undercover police officer said to have “gone native” while infiltrating one of the more radical Climate Change groups over a number of years.
Personal contact brings with it no end of risks. J. Edgar Hoover never liked to send agents in undercover for any length of time in case they ended up becoming tainted. For “tainted”, read “involved”, “compromised” or even “convinced” – no longer useful, anyway, as a weapon against their opponents.
But as embarrassing as this must be for the police who appear to have lost a case against members of the group because their man wobbled in post, and as distressing as it may be for the Climate Change group to find that one of their number was informing against them all these years, it is nonetheless heartening to know that, in relationships between people over a protracted period of time, we can still be transformed and changed through contact.
I would have a hard time living in a world where people remained so resolute they could not be moved and changed by the power of relationship.
Such apparent weakness may be the key to any number of dreadful situations around the world where people and communities stare across no man’s land at people they’ve been trained or even raised to despise.
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an audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.27 - halfway along the audio bar