Giving

My friend needed some extras in a silent/black-and-white short-film she is doing, so I spent the day at Church Square drinking Oom Paul's coffee and talking to interesting people. There is nothing like a discussion on the merits of pornography and its audience as background noise to a silent film... However, while walking the 20 metres from Capital Theatre to the Café, my friend's cellphone was stolen.

I don't think people who do not live in a society riddled with crime will understand this, but when we go out, we keep our handbags in the boot of the car, we lock everything ten times, we are hyper-alert at traffic lights and we have all been robbed. Or at least we all know someone. And it pisses me off. There are so many anti-crime associations and organizations aimed at helping whomever needs it. One would think that every person would want to do honourable work, would want to contribute meaningfully to their community. And yet, we have become nonchalant about crime, it is just part of our lives, like corn flakes for breakfast or the Gautrain not coming to Pretoria yet even though they advertise it on TV.

On my way home from the shoot, the radio-presenter was recounting how the day before, he was out with his girlfriend when a car with two respectable-looking young women stopped next to them and the driver asked if she could quickly borrow one of their cellphones because both their batteries were flat and they needed to reach someone. So the guy's girlfriend lent the girl her phone, and while she was still typing an sms, they sped off in the car with the phone.

Unbelievable, isn't it?!

One tries to be helpful, but the accumulation of bad stories really does make one mistrust everyone. I don't stop to help someone with car trouble out of fear that it might be a ruse to kidnap me. I don't give people rides if I don't know them, again out of fear. I think there exists a contradiction in the communal South African character: one the one hand, we are an incredibly friendly and open people, but on the other hand this aspect is reserved for foreigners and we are excessively mistrusting of our fellow citizens. Now don't go saying it is a racist thing, and that this mistrust is based on our history of racial segregation. It is not a case of "us" and "them" in terms of race, but in terms of class. The rich do not trust the poor, but I assume this is a universal phenomenon. Perhaps here the discrepancy between rich and poor is just too huge a chasm and that if one lives in poverty, one does not know how to get out of it.

I also don't know. I mean, my cellphone and money was stolen out of my handbag at a house party with only 20 guests. My sister was burgled in front of our door. Last year October four men broke two gates and a wooden door in a matter of seconds in order to get into our house. Constantly someone is being robbed of some possession.

I can understand if one steals out of a true need, say, for want of food or water or shelter. But it seems to me that crime in South Africa has become increasingly violent for the most meaningless things: people being killed for a cellphone, young schoolgirls raped on their way back from school, someone being smash-and-grabbed while stuck in a traffic jam. It is all just so stupid, and I don't know really what one can do. How can we react?

Already, most people in the big cities live in gated communities, neighbourhoods organize neighbourhood patrols and most citizens want to work with the police. But there is also a sense of helplessness, as the police force appears to be the most corrupt of all and they never solve a case. There is the idea that if no one died, it wasn't serious.

I think we as a country need to change drastically: we need to focus extensively on the education and integration of the lowest classes, re-teaching a value system and moral code that underlies every respectable society. There needs to exist a communal sense of what is wrong and right, and in everyone's mind the desire to do good must outweigh the desire for objects and status by any means possible. Also, the government needs to commit to a complete eradication of corruption.

Naturally this is an ideal that will take generations to achieve. But I believe that we need to instil in our generation this sense of morality that somehow has been lost after the atrocities of previous ages. There are two options for each individual: choose to see humanity as too flawed to do good, or choose to see humanity as having an essentially optimistic and embracing character. After all, each community reflects the collective choices of individuals, and at the moment it seems that South Africans are choosing indifference to their environment as opposed to wanting to change it for the better.


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