On Monday, the ANC issued an official statement in which the ruling party said they condemned the recent spate of child murders in South Africa.
The reaction on social media and opinion forums was overwhelming in its unity.
South Africans had one thing to say: stop condemning and start doing something about the problem.
This reaction struck a chord with me, because every time a child dies senselessly due to criminal acts, I wait with bated breath for South Africans to rise up and force the government to do something, anything, about violent crime.
But somehow we never do. Somehow each child murder just ends up as a statistic. Somehow nobody seems to care about the children of South Africa.
It used to be that when a child died as a result of a crime, people would be up in arms; signing petitions and appealing to their member of parliament. The death of a child would be the last taboo, the one thing that no South African would tolerate.
These days we just don’t seem to care as much. Maybe we are just desensitised by all the senseless killing that assault our sensibilities every day. Maybe we are just selfish and don’t care about the community as a whole anymore.
Maybe we only care when we are directly affected.
Every day horrific photographs of dead children and stories about child killings assault our senses, but we are no longer outraged by these shocking incidents.
We find ways of rationalising our indifference to the children’s suffering. We tell ourselves it doesn’t affect us. We tell ourselves that it is propaganda. We tell ourselves that the photo was posed. We tell ourselves that the photo was doctored.
We are willing to bend over backwards to silence the voice of conscious in our heads.
We will do anything not to take a stand.
