19_When fear comes knocking
A piece about finding peace in chaos
The most violent man I know is scary. He literally hisses and froths from the mouth. When he is like that he just cannot be contained. The veins pop out of his neck and his face goes tomato red while his arms flap around in a frenzy and his ginger hair literally starts to glow with rage.
But he screams only because he is scared, just like us.
The complicated part of life, especially in South Africa, is we need to cultivate fear. Lean into it. Foster it if we are going to stay alive. Personally, I go all primal when someone walks into my safe circle (which is growing bigger by the day). I push out my chest, bare my teeth and create as much of a show of force and strength as I can muster so as not to appear an easy target. And I need to do that, it’s not stupid. Outside my door almost every day humans are mugged. I have seen five personally in the last two months. One was with a panga (knife the size of a man’s leg) swinging like a sword and just last week three cars had their windows smashed in two days.
And that is normal. Yes, N.O.R.M.A.L. For most people living in most areas of South Africa that level of violence is an everyday reality. We claim five of the top twenty most dangerous cities in the world…! Five! That’s twenty-five percent of the most violent locations on planet earth … that’s insane???!!
One of the most hilarious gross inequality stats is the correlation of inequality to the car you drive. The bigger the gap between the rich and poor the more violence right? And the more violence the more need to show force. What is the easiest way to show force when you are outside of your home - drive a big car? Pahaha (I drive a landrover).
The other option is to get extremely violent in return. The video below tells the story of a man that held me at gunpoint and was later mobbed by his community. It was a strategic event, not just blind rage. They first met and decided what to do. When death was the only penalty and solution for his crimes they formed a mob so no one person could be blamed. Then they caught him, tied him up, carried him to the dump, covered him in acid, and then burned him alive.
Fear. That’s why they did it. Same reason that gun stores are overflowing with customers in South Africa and the same reason my friend rants. Fear. In the words of Francis Coppola's Godfather, none of us want to be caught in violence “with nothing but a dick in our hands…” (sorry that is aggressively masculine but I suppose so is violence?)
And after they killed that man the community told me they could breathe for the first time in years. I resonate with that. I could feel it as I walked their streets. It was safer. The peace was real and tangible. They had made a small amount of progress through their action which for months had been bathed in this one man’s selfish stealing and selling their kids’ Whoonga (black tar heroin bulked up with ARVs and rat poison that creates zombies). Neglected by the system these humans are the worst affected by corruption and are generally ignored by fifty million neighbors who call themselves fellow South Africans, so who can really blame them? Definitely not me.
I am not entirely sure what to do about violence. I know I won’t carry a gun (that just creates no-win scenarios). I might move to a bubble thanks to my privilege so I am safer and can have some peace at night when I sleep. I will definitely continue to go all ape-like when others come close that scare me and I’ll probably still continue to practice boxing so I am always ready for hand-to-hand combat…
But one thing I hope never to do is to settle. Settle for a status quo that accepts it as normal. And that gives up my daily right to make atomically small choices to tackle the root causes of where it actually comes from.
