Candlelight vigils not answer to lawlessness

Today that call seems more urgent than ever when I read of the “thinking” of people who reportedly “raided” the Benefit the People Supermarket after a fire on the premises.

Note one account from a daily: “Several criminals, including women, unashamedly walked into the burnt-out place and helped themselves to undamaged goods..., a man using a pram to cart out things, and another taking a swig from a bottle of ‘puncheon’ as if to celebrate his good fortune.” One may argue that this was an isolated incident, but a similar incident in another supermarket recently, taken together, seem to insinuate deliberate arson as means to raiding supermarkets.

In fact, one report endorses this idea in suggesting that “the police have since deduced that there may be a gang of ‘hungry bandits’ targeting places so they can loot from them following a fire...” What is mind-boggling though is that not only criminals, but “ordinary” citizens participated in the feeding frenzy, which point out not only how lawless as a society we have become but also the level of degeneracy into which we have now sunk.

In a lawful society such behaviour is untenable, but with the law as inept as it is, can individuals simply resort to brazenly take what belongs to another with no apparent thought of the consequences of such behaviour? Isn’t this as Darwinian as it can get in the original sense of survival of the fittest? Darwin’s theory was based on animal behaviour , but can it now be applied to the now socialised human animal who seems to have suffered a psychological reversal? This is not as misplaced a speculation as one would think, for if there is the occasional attempt to deprive others of what belongs to them, one can attribute that to the liability intrinsic to an unequal human society. But when such action assumes a normalcy as with these two incidents, have we lost that human constraint that is applicable to properly socialised individuals in a progressive society? Again this letter may seem negative, but instead of taking soft approaches like candlelight vigils and such like, is it not time to take a hard look at what we are becoming, a people who seem to be losing the capacity for logic and a sense of rightness as we plunge deeper into the abyss of self-preservation and survival no matter what the cost? Again our education system must be geared to producing in our young people a mindset that enables them to look at the world with a critical eye, making intelligent choices in the process.

Dr Errol Benjamin ebenjamin522