By Farouk Araie
It is heartbreaking to read of innocent men and women being killed by ruthless criminal thugs. Uber drivers, scooter delivery drivers, maintenance workers, security officers, are being obliterated by demons who have no respect for human lives.
Such savagery bodes ill for our nation, I shudder to think of what will happen when law and order ceases to exist. We are a nation on the edges of a steep cliff, starring into the abyss below. These innocent souls were a bother, sister, mother, father, son uncle, and husband to someone. It is indeed extremely sad that it takes tragic deaths of innocent souls, to massively jolt the conscious of the entire country. These gruesome killings became a symbol. A symbol of the impotence of our world and how cheap our blood has become today. We are ready to bludgeon to death the weak, the vulnerable ,the unguarded. Sooner or later, what we all fought for to attain liberty, equality and prosperity will be burnt into cinders by the mobs' disdain for the values of sacred human life.
The country and it’s law enforcement machinery, have been on auto-pilot amidst this crisis shaking the country. They remain deaf to the cries and agony of all our people. The death of one security guard means nothing to them. He is merely another statistic. As a fractured and imbalanced society, we have acquired an immunity to painful tragedies. We sadly have reached the point where we cannot gauge danger anymore. We are too disengaged to connect the dots between tragedy and it's human impact. As incredible as it seems, we have been anesthetised to the horrors of the brutal killings of innocent citizens in our country, as cruel deaths multiply on an hourly basis. It is shocking, that, heartbreaking tragedies, no longer have the power to devastate us.
We have developed a tolerance to tragedy. Over 50 people are murdered every day ,we grimly watch ,as the horror explodes into our living rooms as we follow local events. We sadly, have become detached from death and destruction, because it does not affect us. We are in denial as we witness innocent lives being butchered, killed, maimed, and many are displaced, little do we realise that we are rushing headlong, and plunging our nation towards annihilation.
Under our grisly circumstances, I feel compelled to quote, one of the greatest speeches delivered 200 years ago by, former slave Frederick Douglass, on July 4.1852. His profound words could apply to present day South Africa. I will paraphrase parts of his profound speech as it would apply to our situation. Our democratic institutions and it’s constant celebrations are indeed a sham. Our boasted liberty, an unholy license, our professed national greatness, swelling vanity; our sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; our denunciations of extremism, brass-fronted impudence; our shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; our prayers and blood curling freedom songs, are mere bombast, fraud ,deception, impiety and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes, that are truly revolting that violate the sacredness and sanctity of human life. Unless and until we expunge violence from our behaviour and inflammatory language from our discourse ,we will as a nation be heading into the bowels of absolute tyranny.
Cape Argus