Sometimes I get heartily sick of the heckling and harping that we all, especially myself, go on with week after week about the wankers, woolyheads and wrongdoers and worse, with whom we're forever afflicted.

More so, since the only apparent response to our harsh words is a rash of ever more atrocious deeds. For example, despite ever more damning criticism of the US administration's dismal and disastrous adventures in Iraq, George W Bush and Dick Cheney are now threatening to up the ante by also attacking Iran.

In Australia, the Howard Government, widely reviled for its failure to face facts about and act on climate change, to treat refugees with more compassion and show respect for workers' rights, is spending $200 million of taxpayers' money this year advertising its 'achievements' in these areas in hopes of winning itself another term in office.

And in Malaysia the more corruption and cronyism the Barisan Nasional government commits and permits, the more spectacular its kleptocratic activities become. Or is it just that the alternative media are exposing more of its monumental misdeeds these days?

Whether the situation is going increasingly to the dogs, as the 2006 Auditor-General's Report seems to suggest, or whether it's just more of the same old same old and we're just getting sicker of criticising the system ad nauseam without any apparent result, it's hard to say.

At times like this, when I become disenchanted with my role as a critic or at least bored with how repetitious I feel my criticism is becoming, I'm sometimes reduced to wondering whether criticism is even justified, recalling the saying often attributed to North-American Indians, "never criticise a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins".

Not that it's likely that the Indians, North American or otherwise, ever said any such thing. For a start I doubt that they had any such measure of distance as a 'mile'. And then there's the fact that many tribes clearly had few reservations about criticising either each other or the palefaces who so mistreated and later misquoted them.

So critical of their enemies were the men in moccasins, in fact, that those who incurred their displeasure often very quickly found themselves on the back foot, if not, like the famous George Custer and many others, actually dying with their boots on.

The fine line

Whatever its origins, however, the charitable notion of putting oneself in another person's shoes still stands. Not only as a rebuke to all us carpers and critics, but as a fundamental teaching of the religious leaders in whose footsteps a good many of us claim to be walking.

On second thoughts, though, some prophets and deities didn't always toe a very forgiving line, advocating stoning to death and sundry other dire punishments for various offences, and thus inevitably giving the impression that even when it comes to saving souls, it's not always necessary to put yourself in the other guy's soles.

Faced with such confusingly conflicting examples of forbearance and forgiveness on the one hand and punitive ferocity on the other, it's hardly surprising that we, the ordinary, everyday disenchanted, disgruntled and disgusted ones, sometimes find ourselves hardly knowing which way to jump.

When our liberties, sensibilities and rights and get trampled on, what are we supposed to do? Strut a mile in the jackboots of the oppressors and their enforcers in the hope that we'll eventually come to sympathise with their sheer delight in goose-stepping all over mankind and getting away with it?

Do we owe it to ourselves to slip on the tasseled loafers of corporate crooks or the sensible black lace-ups of crooked officials to try and gain an appreciation of how fabulous it feels to walk away with all the loot and leave the poor and dispossessed on their uppers?

Should we slither around in the sneakers of drug dealers, rapists, thieves and every other species of creep in the hope of empathising with their need to get their kicks and/or bucks at our expense?

Do we fake a few steps in the footwear of all the trumped-up 'celebrities' and other exploiters of our gullibility in the hope of discovering how good it feels to have the world grovel at one's feet?

No we don't. Not in my book, anyway. As a cab driver in a Southeast Asian city once told me after half an hour's coruscating his country's rulers for their corruption, "of course in their place I'd do exactly the same".

And very likely he would, just as I might and so might you. We're each of us only human, after all, and, given half a chance, likely to be just as greedy, grasping, power-mad or just plain criminally ga-ga as the next guy.

We walk a very fine line between passive subjection to error and evil, and complicity or outright collusion in it - so much so that the act of putting the boot into those who misuse and abuse us and our fellows is as much a mechanism for keeping ourselves on the straight-and-narrow as it's a punishment for the transgressors.

All things considered, therefore, the very thought of curbing my critical urges, as sick as I get at times of doing it so repetitively and apparently in vain, makes me feel like a heel. There's little point in having the means to communicate if we're going to tiptoe around the truth.

In other words, as tired as I sometimes get of constantly criticising, and as appealing as it might be in some ways to play footsie with good fellowship and jog along complacently in other men's moccasins, I'm more for keeping on mocking their sins.