Monday 19 May 2008

Storms under the tower: Your Gold or your Blood


We're always under storm clouds in this city of gold, sometimes thunderous and beautiful and often murderous and frightful. I was given some advice to write shorter blogs more often and this was meant to be it. An angry outburst with a weak punch landing here like thunder shakes my flat windows but changes little.

I'm sick to my stomach, and angry. A cheap easy emotion. Mobs of people swept across streets and terrified, and hurt and murdered this weekend. Angry mobs. Some in the name of national 'rights' and others through pure criminal hate. I watched about six people die in slow motion last night in 'Mr Brooks', a serial killer flick. I flinched and felt ill with each death and the pleasure the murderers took. Sick. This morning I walked past newspaper vendors and tried desperately not to see the front page image of a man on his knees, burnt alive, still alive, being extinguished by a policeman. Sick.

They say we are almost all capable of it, of cruelty and murder. The right moment in blind anger, more scarily only three days of the right environment and even in cool calculated ways we could kill. Or standby and let someone kill. According to the US psychology professor that charged the US Army with complicity in the cases against soldiers that tortured Iraqi prisoners, less than 10% of us would stand up to it, would behave the way we like to believe.

So where's that environment coming from? We are all complicit, our world is skewed to create it. Of 18 million children in SA 11 million live in homes that earn less then 2500 rand a month. Stephen Pinker, another psychologist, shows that levels of violence in a society are more strongly linked to levels of inequality than to levels of poverty. Our happiness is linked to what we believe we should have, not what we do have. Those mobs killing foreigners are angry, those criminals killing old woman in their houses are angry. They believe that they do not have because the foreigners do, because the old lady did and they hate enough to kill. There are millions living in a world of nothing with a permanent window to a world of plenty and few doors to get there.

What we saw this weekend, and the murders we see every weekend, make me angry, and sick. But not blind. We, South Africa, the world, are building these environments. I cannot forgive those that murder, it is still a choice, but we must all find a way to stop creating breeding grounds for them, and for the mobs. I can't forgive us either. It is hard, we are all angry. We must work to fix it...or it will murder us too.