Get Involved for a Safer Community
Grannies (and Grandpas) against drugs and violence escalation – get involved and make your area a safer place to live!TV news (14 Feb 2012) mentioned grannies in Wentworth, Durban who got together and now patrol the streets in the early mornings, ensuring that children go to school. They do a lot of other things as well.
45'ers Get Together
Countrywide if us people over 45 got together in a local coffee shop, community hall, church – wherever - and decided to become actively involved in our community for even 2 hours a, the outcome would be less isolation for house and flat dwellers, monitoring of scholars and the people who approach them while going to/from school, monitoring of vagrants and cars parked in the area that don’t belong there, etc. – use your imagination.
The spinoff would be an almost immediate drop in crime and a far greater knowledge of the skills, the needs and the problems of one’s immediate neighbours.
City living naturally leads to isolation. The more heads per kilometre, the greater the isolation of the individual; therefore the greater the vulnerability to harm from other individuals. Conditioned mistrust and prejudice are thus maintained.
As the number of unemployed, unskilled school leavers has escalated over the past 8 years, so has the crime rate - as a natural consequence. Homes in suburban areas have been hit hard by robbery, rape, aggravated assault and murder, and people living in suburbs have become more fearful and mistrustful of unknown, unidentified strangers – a natural consequence.
Isolation leads to 'Strangers'
The problem is, when we don’t know our next door neighbour at least as an acquaintance - or who lives next door to them and at the end of the street - the concept of ‘stranger’ is magnified. Fearful people become more afraid, fear leads to mistrust, mistrust to hatred. Fear and strong dislike of unknown, unidentified strangers leads to societal schizophrenia.
South Africa had different forms of societal schizophrenia thrust upon it by Apartheid logic and since the new dispensation by populist logic. To a large extent suburbs and areas based on racial classification - and the societal prejudices- remain.
Grannies and grandpas of ALL race groups must find out who lives next door, get involved in the local structures - and where there aren’t any or they don’t work, make them - so that strangers become acquaintances and relationships are formed that will protect our grandchildren and our elderly, keep our streets safe and ensure that the drug peddlers have no place to hide. Hate would die of starvation and communities would become close-knit, secure places to be.
We have knowledge, the skills and the power – do we have the will to individually and collectively start the change? We MUST have. Nobody else will, ladies and gentlemen – we have to do it on our own.
If you have any suggestions on how to start a grannies and grandpas neighbourhood group please contact me on bitbobbit@gmail.com.
