A Few Words with Friends

Today on air, I gave an impassioned speech about the state of our country. Every day we open up our newspapers, and we hear of the atrocities that people inflict on one another on a regular basis. We read of rape, and murder and house break ins and the like, and every day, along with those affected by crime, we all die a little.

However, during my impassioned speech, I compared humans to animals, which instantly got a few people hot under the collar. In fact, I was instantly rebuked for disrespecting animals. Let’s forget about the woman from our city who was recently, repeatedly raped by a gang, or the 8 year old girl who was raped and had her eye gouged out, or the family who died at the hands of their gardener and their domestic worker’s son. Taken out of context, I suppose, juxtaposing my tame tabby cat to a person capable of hurting another person, would be unfathomable, however on a regular basis, this same tabby cat, used to kill mice for sport, and brought them home to me as trophies, so the idea that animals do in fact kill for amusement, for awards, or as “presents” for their masters, is not as far-fetched as one would be led to believe.

The fact that I’m talking about a pet cat, is exactly what is wrong with society. The fact that I was berated for drawing a comparison between an animal and a human being, both capable of inflicting harm with undue reason, is to me, in all honesty, ridiculous. In making a statement during my show today, and discussing the disgusting degree to which our society has regressed, it angers me to think that in a society as diseased as ours, we have to play around with semantics.

South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world, and day after day, we are confronted with the disgusting way in which people treat human beings. Abuse, molestation, robberies, even death, these words are not uncommon to the typical South African, they are the symptoms of a world, immersed in a game of words, far too scared to address the important issues, so we argue about ways in which to be most politically correct.

I am a single, female, living alone. Nelson Mandela would have me believe that every person has a “core of human decency”, but with every single story I read in my newspaper, I lose more and more faith in the human race. In his inaugural speech, Mandela quoted Marianne Williamson, “My deepest fear is not that I am inadequate” and how apt are those words, my deepest fear is to wake up in my own home to the possibility that there may be an unwelcomed guest standing beside my bed, and I will feel their presence in my life, until my dying day, if of course I do not die at their very hands.

I am angry, I feel cheated, and as a young woman, I rue bringing children into a world, where I, myself, feel unsafe. I love animals, and in no way, meant any harm in my statements, but in having to apologise for my word usage, the entire meaning behind our on air conversation was lost, and I felt like I had sold out to appease the general public. So while I may be apologetic for dragging my harmless tabby into this discussion, I hate that society has made me apologise for what I believe to be true. And that is that we, as a public, need to stop skirting around the bigger issues, and as a community, fight the pandemic that has afflicted our beautiful country.

We need to hold our government accountable to their promises, we need to fight crime and ensure that in the end, we leave a world to our (future) children, as beautiful as the one we enjoy today. A world where they feel safe, where they respect their fellow men (and women), a world where colour doesn't matter, because the only race we're a part of, is the human race. Humanity, respect, kindness... I dream of this world.