Today it was reported (I couldn’t read the article, Big friendly told me the headline) that a man was murdered in Actonville for hiring foreign labour.
My brother phoned me and told me he had nightmares last night. He has always been the arch defender of South Africa, but today he is horrified and scared. People were being killed in Jeppestown, not 3km from where he lives.
My sister-in-law heard someone on talk radio ask, "Who is next? When there are no more Zimbabweans or Malawians will middle class blacks be targeted? Whites? People who drive 4x4s?"
I know there are many who don’t want to see this, don’t want to hear this. But I am raging. Roaring. I cannot shut up.
Rudy Nadler-Nir
Bertolt Brecht had this to say on the issue:
Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?
It is true: I work for a living
But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!
But how can I eat and drink
When I take what I eat from the starving
And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would happily be wise.
The old books teach us what wisdom is:
To retreat from the strife of the world
To live out the brief time that is your lot
Without fear
To make your way without violence
To repay evil with good –
The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires,
But to forget them.
But I cannot heed this:
Truly I live in dark times!
–Bertolt Brecht, An die Nachgeborenen first published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939) in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, pp. 722-25 (1967)(S.H. transl.)
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002129
megan
Thank you for this beautiful and sad thing Rudy.