What’s wrong with our society?
Is a life worth only the price of a few beers or a couple of "dops" at the tavern?
For many people in other parts of the country Ermelo is simply a sleepy small town “out there” somewhere in “Mapumalanga”, “Mumpumalanga”, Mpumalanga or whatever, where nothing much ever happens except for constantly getting a mention on the weather reports as one of the coldest towns in the country.
As for nothing much ever happening,- don’t you believe it!
Reporting crime in this newspaper is a task that largely befalls me, although I must hasten to say not exclusively.
Some of the things that go on in our town are really quite disturbing indeed.
The pace of the job at hand on deadline is sometimes quite hectic and one often becomes oblivious to the severity or the impact of the crimes on which one is reporting. There is not much time to ponder over matters, because the stories must get done on time.
This week was, however, totally different.
Four murders over the weekend in Ermelo! Four people who to many are nameless and faceless individuals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In all likelihood we will read the report and then turn the page and go on with our lives.
But in another four families life will never be the same again. The lives of another four husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and loved ones have been changed forever.
Why?
What is wrong with our society? What were such big issues that they could not be sorted out without having to resort to violence, wielding knives and snuffing out lives?
I realise fully that hardly a week goes by without someone being murdered or raped in our “sleepy little town” and that as far as statistics go this is supposedly “normal”.
But four murders in one weekend? This cannot be “normal”.
Why then is it that we as a community have come to accept that weekend murders and rapes are normal?
This is a sheer disregard for human life and a bad reflection on an intolerant section of society and it must stop.
One murder is one too many, but four in one weekend is simply disgusting.
Come on, Ermelo. How can there ever be progress across all walks of life if people are constantly stopping to pick fights with one another and taking the quick fix way out by murdering the person being disagreed with?
Is a life worth only the price of a few beers or a couple of “dops” at the tavern?
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