Senseless Violence

I watched the Carte Blanche special the other night (26 September 2007) about all the violent crimes and senseless murders in our country. And it shocked me to my core. The Directors comments afterwards really got me thinking.

What he basically said was the following: South Africans have a tendency to only care when it hits home. When it happens to your brother, sister or other family member. We have become so numb when it comes to violence that unless it happens to someone we care about, then we don’t even bat an eyelid.

When did all this happen, when did we lose all respect for life in general?

I like to think of myself as a very caring person – It really gets to be me to see that in last year alone we had over 17 000 murders in our little country. Although, doesn’t that sound rather impersonal when we put it like that. 17 000 murders – It de humanizes it! Now I’m sorry, but shouldn’t we rather be saying that someone’s grandmother died, or that a 4 year olds mom was raped and murdered - for the one ring she had on her finger – that wasn’t worth much to begin with.


Shouldn’t we be saying that a person, who meant just as much to someone else as my mom to me, was shot!! We live in a beautiful country with so much potential. We are a great nation, with so much to offer ourselves and the world, but I look around me and all I see is hatred and prejudice.

People living in fear, to scared to buy something because tomorrow it will be stolen. And when you are hijacked or tied up on the bed while they ransack your house, all we say is at least they didn’t kill you!!

That is such a bullshit remark, ‘at least they didn’t kill you’. What people don’t understand is that the more the criminals get to do that, the more they do Kill you, they murder your confidence, they murder your ability to trust and respect other people, they murder your future dreams to perhaps bring kids into this world.

People, I think we should stop avoiding the situation and start talking about it, stop pointing fingers to apartheid and stop thinking that criminals are defined by their skin colour! Stop pointing the finger and take an active stand! If we need to educate more, then we need educate more, if we need to create more safe havens for kids to grow up in to keep them out of the hands of gangsters, murderers or rapists then that is what we need to do.