Life is cheap

The recent brutal attack and senseless murder of an elderly farmer and his female companion within our community has surely filled one and all with a sense of abomination.

The severity and brutality with which the attacks were carried out on the defenceless victims is simply too much for a peace-loving mind to fathom and has filled one with unspeakable disgust.

This is not only because the victims were known to many members of our community and not only because they were related to well-known people within the community.

It is true one is bound to “feel” it more when a tragedy such as this strikes near to home and the reaction of the community is quite understandable.

Emotions run high and everyone has an opinion on what should be done with the perpetrators and how they should be punished and made to pay for their deeds.

Sadly, these emotions of the community at large tend not to last very long. The focus is soon shifted to other issues of the day.

The fact is, every day of the year lives are lost at the hands of criminals and many of these murders are not even reported on in the media. Those incidents that do receive media coverage are so commonplace these days that only a few eyebrows are raised.

Another cold fact is that hardly a weekend goes by without someone being shot, stabbed or beaten to death in our townships in Msukaligwa alone. Other seemingly more important or emotional issues soon grab our attention and life goes on.

An example of this was recently illustrated on our newspaper’s social media platform.

The report on the farm murder attracted close to 4 500 views on our social media page. Two comments were made by people expressing their sympathy and outrage.

This was in stark contrast to the report on the cutting down of certain trees at the Pet Dam.

The subsequent disruption of nesting egrets and killing of hatchlings evoked a harsh response from the community.

This report, together with a letter by a reader expressing his disgust at the incident, elicited a combined total of less than half the views of the murder report, yet 16 comments were made by readers who vehemently expressed their views.

While this shows that people still care for nature and the environment, and rightly so, it also demonstrates the sad fact that violent attacks on human beings and the bombings and killing of innocent men, women and children around the world have become so commonplace that we, the human race, have sadly become bland and unaffected by loss of human life.

And we are supposed to be the crown jewels of creation?

In financial terms life may have become extremely expensive, but on the human side life has become alarmingly cheap.