Perhaps it is better to be ‘born free’ than not

Sir,
With the Born Free Generation’s first election around the corner, it got me thinking about what they must think about this supposedly ‘free’ South Africa that they were born into, with its awesome set of human rights. What is definitely ‘free’, are T-shirts in any shade of yellow, poor quality education and fraudulent grant claims. People are ‘free’ to rape and steal and assault others at will. As for rights, it appears as if the majority of people in this country feels that they have the right to express themselves violently, the right to destroy others’ property in the name of the right to participate in labour movements, and the right to abuse children, instead of protecting them.
The focus in this country seems to be on racial or political issues, instead of the massive social ones. We have some of the highest rape statistics in the world, but the lowest crime solving rates.
We have huge numbers of criminals packed into prisons, while the vast majority are still operating in the streets. We have police officers more guilty than the criminals that they apprehend. We have children living on the streets – in desperately sad situations – yet they are treated with no compassion (from their families, the man on the street or the government). We have the public coffers being pillaged by government employees and their cohorts.
Perhaps it is better to have been ‘born free’ than not, as only we that remember the ‘old days’ can miss what we had before: well-run schools, minimal corruption, competence and trust in the police. Apartheid was a massive trampling of human rights, certainly! But the end of this era also brought about the end of personal accountability, and with the dawn of a free country came the dawning of new greed and violence. We have exchanged the repression of some races by others for the freedom to steal and rape and demand to have what we don’t deserve. I was taught to take responsibility for my actions – rewards when earned and punishment when deserved. It was the whole of society that taught me this, not just my parents. But what society is teaching children now, is that the past mistakes of others are excuses to keep making their own, over and over and over. Society these days teaches children to demand what they want, and to take it if it is not given freely.
If I were ‘born free’, I would be very disappointed that the country that my parents fought to save is lying in ruins, burning like a tyre in a Soweto riot. I would be disappointed that the universities and schools that were claimed for me are fraught with maladministration and incompetence. I would be scared for the future of my children, knowing that they are more likely to contract HIV than not, more likely to be assaulted and raped than not. I would be praying that my ‘free’ country is one day free of corruption and violence, and free from politicians who rape the system to their own benefit. I would be thinking that if this is what my parents fought for, then maybe they were wasting their time, because what they have made doesn’t seem worth fighting for.
The ruling party in South Africa, who ‘won’ this country for ‘the people’, has turned around to tread on the same people for whom this country was saved. It is like a parent being unconditionally loved by the child that it beats and starves. Beaten children grow up to have fists of their own, and in the case of the ruling party maybe it’s time the children disciplined the parents. Again Nothing Changes (ANC)