Reasons For My Recent Absence

 

Unlike many of my small yet faithful readership, I have been absent for several weeks from these pages. My thanks go out to those persistent readers who flatter me greatly by their repeated visits to my site in spite of my recent silence. I just hope that you will all forgive my lapse and continue your visits.

 

Perhaps some had thought that I had been the target of crime, with a dash of xenophobia thrown in for good measure. No, nothing quite so dramatic, thankfully.

 

I have been absent for rather more prosaic – and, it must be said, selfish – reasons.

 

Firstly, I have to confess that I find writing to be extremely hard work – and which is probably self-evident from the quality of what I have produced thus far. I have always been mildly word- and number-blind at the best of times and this can be disadvantageous when one’s brain races faster than the ability to write or type out thoughts into an acceptable format. It can take me several days to produce one of my little contributions.

 

And despite sharing the fault of many writers – namely, that of having the arrogance in assuming that what one wishes to express is worthy of the time and attention of one’s hoped-for readers – I tend to avoid until the last possible minute actually creating the masterful missive, waiting until the urge to present my particular and peculiar ideas can be restrained no longer.

 

A driven firebrand clearly I am not…

 

Secondly, my office is fiery hot in summer and numbingly cold during winter. Owing to the fact that our beloved telecommunications monopoly, Telkom, no longer wishes to provide fixed-line telephone/fax/Internet services to my suburb (just 40 km from the centre of Johannesburg), I have had to resort to the incredibly more expensive and temperamental wireless services offered by a local cell phone network – whose signals are unavailable within the body of my house. Consequently, I have had to move my office into a partially completed and totally uninsulated outbuilding some distance from the house where, on good days, I can receive a signal just barely adequate to conduct my modest business and creative activities.

 

Today, with an outside temperature of around 19 degree Celsius and 8 degrees Celsius inside my spacious storeroom/barn, it is not too bad. Yet my fingers are still stiff with cold, my feet no longer part of my body and my arms and torso almost immobile because of the layers of clothing encasing my shivering frame.

 

Thirdly, since my last post last month I had the chance to earn a couple of bucks, so had to take a few days chasing some consultancy work – regular full-time and permanent work is hard to come by for a white man in his fifties in South Africa these days. As mentioned in a previous post, I like to eat on occasion.

 

Fourthly, I have been severely distracted by some immediate family concerns.

 

The first of these has been the impending permanent departure from South Africa of my daughter and her little family. At last, she has had enough of the crime, the corruption, the utter indifference to levels of professional service delivery and the inability for a person of her considerable energies and skills to progress in life merely because of her European ancestry.

 

This truly is a tragedy for South Africa. Even allowing for the fact that she is my daughter and my resultant natural bias, I have come across few people who have demonstrated anything like the grit, doggedness and sheer natural ability of this young woman. Having divorced her pathetic and selfish excuse of a husband (and whom I shall be making a point of seeking out one of these fine days), penniless and with a small daughter of her own in tow, she has exhibited a strength of character that saw her not only raise her child into someone I am proud of but also drove her to carve out a life and career to the maximum possible under the circumstances of present-day South Africa.

 

Her new life will be no easier to begin with. She will, however, be allowed to take her career to whatever level she desires; the only obstacles she will face in her new home will be those imposed by her ambitions and her talents.

 

I shall greatly miss her and my first granddaughter.

 

The second family concern that has been occupying my attention in recent weeks relates to my second granddaughter.

 

Born three months premature last month, this little pink angel has been fighting for her life since being so rudely thrust out into the world. Fractionally larger than my outstretched hand when I first saw her the day after her delivery, she has repeatedly faced the spectre of death – including surgery on a heart little larger than my thumbnail (and, in the process, reducing the surgeon and his team to tears as they worked their incredible skills on that tiny body).

 

Expecting, at any moment, to hear the worst, this little girl has fought back time and time again. We all thought that the end had come early this week when, hours after the heart surgery, she crashed catastrophically. One of the nursing staff, bless her, even hung around in the waiting room for several hours that same night – after the end of her twelve-hour shift – just to be there.

 

After counseling my son and his wife, the decision was reached by the doctors to take the baby off the ventilator. The family gathered to say their farewells to her and to await the arrival of the doctor who would be switching the machines off.

 

The machines are still running. Incredibly, joyously, just one hour before the due time, my little granddaughter, whom I had angrily accepted that I would never know, rallied and, for the time being at least, re-stormed the ramparts of life yet again.

 

Even those most cynical of creatures, the doctors and nurses, described the recovery as ‘miraculous’.

 

Who knows what the next hours, days, weeks and months will bring. Perhaps all of the terrors and fears of the last few weeks will be for naught. I feel most, of course, for my son and daughter-in-law. My desperate hopefulness can be as nothing compared to theirs. The little that my wife and self have been able to do has been confined largely to babysitting our three-year old grandson and trying to distract him away from his bewilderment and anxiety at all the upset within his family at present.

 

To those who gave thought and prayer to the newest member of our family in her predicament I offer my thanks – even though I have never met or known most of you. To the doctors and nurses at the Medi-Clinic where this little drama is being played out, I offer my thanks for your skill and concern.

 

To my new granddaughter – be with God and give it all you have.

 

Spearpoint.

12th June 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crime and Punishment

I have long been intrigued by countries around the world going to all the trouble of drafting and then adopting constitutions of one sort or another. Much national pride goes into a country’s constitution and the attendant rights accorded the citizenry. South Africa is no exception.

 The amazing thing is that, once having gone to all that effort, countries like South Africa then proceed to totally ignore that hard-won constitutional document (regardless of the form it might take) in the way that they treat their convicted criminals.

 Crime can be defined as being those acts or omissions which contravene public law. Since public law can only be derived from and is, therefore, secondary to a nation’s constitution, the contravention of that law can be taken to be a violation of that society’s constitution and the consequent individual and/or group rights of the members of that social identity.

 Thus, if one pulls a gun on a person and then one proceeds to relieve that citizen of desirable items of property, one is violating the enshrined rights of the victim just as much as if the victim is murdered. Likewise with pickpockets, fraudsters, dangerous drivers, and so on.

 In commiting a crime the criminal is, in effect (if not explicitly), stating that he or she has no desire or intention of being a part of society. He steps outside the law (becoming an “outlaw”) and in ignoring or violating the rights of his victim thereby summarily and immediately surrenders (upon detection and conviction) his identical rights as a member of that society.

The criminal is, therefore, saying “I don’t like or agree with this society, even though I was born and raised into it. I reject my neighbour’s wider norms and values”.

Why, then, should society continue to protect, feed, house, clothe and otherwise sustain such individuals? Why should the law-abiding members of the society spurned by the criminal continue to be robbed of money and resources in clasping the criminal to their bosom in the form of prisons and the huge financial, emotional and ethical burdens that they entail?

In South Africa, at least, and notwithstanding claims to the contrary, prisons are utilised primarily for the purposes of punishment and conveniently (if shortsightedly) removing the source of trouble (the convicted criminal) from the streets. Prisons are society’s revenge for breaking the rules.

What a costly revenge; and if the criminal undergoes no rehabilitation of thought and behaviour then society merely sweeps the problem under the rug until the release of the criminal – when, given the statistics on recidivism are anything to go by, the problem recurs and society is again confronted with the dislocation and costs of convicting and emprisoning the criminal again.

I am, of course, grossly over-simplifying some of the issues and I do so in order to make my point as quickly as posssible. Let us assume, just to give a nod to some of the complicating issues which I am skirting, that we limit the following only to the perpetrators of violent crime – so prevalent in South Africa as be the main type of crime committed.

Should a country, such as South Africa, at least not consider responding to the criminal by, in effect, saying “OK, so you don’t like our society and you wish to become outlaw; then we shall oblige you by removing you from our society in a manner that will also remove the benefits of our society from your reach”.

This could be done quite simply. We have large uninhabited tracts of land within our borders. We (if I understand correctly) have offshore possessions in the Southern Ocean. Let the outlaws be placed where we are beyond their reach; let them see if they can live without law; let them see if they can build whatever it is that they want but can’t find in our society without disregarding and violating the rights of their fellow citizens.

Sure, we can initially give them just enough materials (timber, bricks, cement, even food) to get them started without their isolation being an automatic death sentence. But after that, they are on their own. If they cannot build a house, they must learn. If they cannot grow or find food, they must learn. If their fellow exiles are violent and abusive it is of little concern to us since the criminal has already decided that violent and abusive behaviour is what he chooses over the possibility of law, order and contribution to the growth and development of a worthwhile society.

 Cruel and unusual punishment?

I don’t think so. Certainly it is no less cruel or unusual than raping a child, pulling a gun on a terrified robbery victim or engaging in public shootouts where careless crossfire kills a baby on her mother’s back or a scared 12-year old girl crouching in fear in the back of her mother’s car.

This type of solution might go a long way to reducing the widespread and very real fear of living in a country where it might be your turn in the next five minutes to be robbed, raped, mutilated for muti, hijacked or simply involved as a hapless spectator-cum-target in a shooting gallery located on the public highway. The deterrent value is high and the complete removal of the convicted perpetrator from the streets has to have immediate and positive benefits.

 Spearpoint.