Wim van der Walt
We read continuously in this daily paper about the deterioration of a humane society on the Cape Flats.
Our response is either disgust about the disrespect for other human beings as the gangs, a pseudo projection of skewed empowerment, fight each other for superiority, notwithstanding children, innocent women, young people aspiring to better their lives, all in the line of fire. Or we apply a schizophrenic sense of morality and accompanying passiveness to leave them to themselves or to the inadequate capacity of the governmental social system to reform a society in total despair.
We have a choice. Either we become actively involved to turn this sad situation around or we can keep neglecting them, continuing with our middle-class lives, indulging in solipsistic joys, accumulating materialistic goods, houses, cars and having our private braais after the game of rugby on the TV, and thus vote and display consumerism and a one-dimensional lifestyle as our deepest religion or enactment of a shallow humanity.
Harsh? Only if we keep on neglecting the debasement of human lives not many kilometres away from our fully functioning local display of a split-minded "humane society".
It is up to us. We, middle-class people, need to start doing things in an ongoing way to win the war for humanity on the turf of a lost and hopeless part of our brothers and sisters. There are some awe-inspiring individuals in that staggering area who stand up for humane standards. But they are all alone.
We need to become the conscience of greedy people feeding their souls with just more and more excursions to shopping malls; we need to protest against a disfunctioning government not doing effective, 21st century work regarding this cancerous degrading of people out there on the Flats.
We need a rehabilitation effort on all levels to break the spirit of destruction, and to give people hope. We therefore need religious groups, of all persuasions, humanitarian organisations, skilled professionals, ordinary people with human hearts, to join together in organised events to start doing what is morally and ethically right.
We, most readers of the morning papers, have full-time jobs, families to feed, and this is already not easy, there is not much spare time. So, if people paid to uphold communities, react in passiveness, just thoughtlessly turning to the next page of this paper, being it sensation, sport, and don't become active by picking up a phone and start the long-delayed process, we will keep on drifting through base days, months and years.
And for government, I guess they are married to structured ways, making love to pretences and paperwork and, at heart, just don't care enough about their people.
We await spiritual leaders, humane organisations to act. The lost ones out there, watching the daily break of more pain and hopelessness, they don't know of people with compassion that could, and should, come walking round the corner with professional and integrated restoration offensives.
Wim van der Walt
Bellville