I watched a YouTube video earlier today
honouring the forty-nine victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. One cannot
but be moved as each one’s story is told in about thirty seconds. Earlier this
week social media came alive with the news of the attack at the Attaturk
Airport in Istanbul. Thirty-six more victims at the hands of someone who had a
difference in belief and opinion. Somehow, somewhere someone was able to
convince these young men to take up arms, strap high explosives to their bodies
and enter a public space and wreak as much havoc as possible. They would pay
the highest price a human can pay simply because they needed to make point.
What that point is we may never know. Analyst will speculate for days and
weeks. We will never know. They died making their point. Along with that, they caused untold pain and
misery to the families of the thirty six victims and to the two hundred odd
people left injured. The kid that walked into the Pulse nightclub knew what he
was doing. Someone somewhere had managed to get into his head and convince him
being gay is wrong. He was married. He had a family. Yet to him, the only way he
could get his point across was to buy a gun and walk into a crowded place and
“make his point”. We will never really know what motivated him. Analyst will
speculate for days. The digging up of the dirt will go on for as long as is
necessary. Yet the pain and the agony he wreaked will live on forever. Forty-nine
families will live with the pain of having lost loved ones.
Dirt collection day in our “neck of the
woods” happens on Tuesdays. I often lay in bed at about five in the morning
listening to the sound of the trollies been pushed down the road. At times,
they irritate the living daylights out of me. The other morning I watched an
oldish looking lady through my cosy little office window. I am not sure why,
yet I went outside and my first in inclination was to shout at her and vent my
irritation. Instead, I went out and said “more antie”. She looked at me with
utter disbelief. Maybe she was expecting me to breath the wrath of frustration
down on her. The little boy with her
screamed with wild excitement when he saw my tree climbing cat high in the tree
above him. “Mamma kyk, die kat is innie boem”. Our exchange was brief. Why was
she doing this. What was she looking for. What do they get for what they find.
She found a single cold drink tin. She gets forty cents a kilo for a can. We all
know what that can weighs. Yet she has to dig through what we discard in order
to feed the five year old. She sleeps under the bridge of the very busy N7
highway that passes nearby.
Art Matthews penned the words Peace, Love
More Tolerance. While he had his moment with our national anthem, I will always
remember him for that song and the video they made with it. Our beloved Madiba
even makes a little cameo appearance. My
point is this. It is so much easier to break something than to put it back
together. The glass that is dropped on the floor, shatters into a million
slivers. It can’t be glued back
together. Instead, the shards are swept up and binned. Relationships torn apart
through infidelity, mistrust or some or other act of betrayal are often not
restorable. The fact is, there are some things that simply cannot be fixed. That’s
just life. We can, however, show compassion, a little understanding. We can
even take a split second to look beyond the obvious. The song once said every
face tells a story. Consider the bin picker that irritates us. The one who
comes begging at the gate. The guy driving in that flashy sports car living in
the house on the hill. We all carry a
story within us. A little compassion, a little understanding, a silent thought
before that racist word is uttered or typed, will go a long way to change our
world. I know all this may sound horribly simplistic. Yet that’s precisely it.
It’s much simpler than we will ever know.
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