Are we teetering on the brink of anarchy?
It certainly feels like it at times, especially when I read how innocent people are being slaughtered by barbaric gangsters.
Generally, I don’t feel much sympathy when they are killing each other.
I would rather not have the kids spectating over their dead bodies in the streets, but that is sadly what we have allowed our society to evolve into.
But these days I am seeing more and more stories of innocent and hard-working people being targeted.
Lawyers who are doing their jobs and fulfilling their oaths, children playing in their own yards, public servants and last week, two men delivering bread in Delft.
The bread delivery guys gunned down inside their truck last week, were such men.
They woke up on Thursday morning prepared to go earn an honest day’s living, doing a relatively safe job bringing sustenance to the community.
Instead they needlessly lost their lives to gangsters who get a sense of power from the fact that they have a gun on their hands.
It seems to me that gangsters are on a mission to destabilise communities, by ensuring that there are no more decent people left.
We are losing university students, high school kids, business people, artists and promising athletes, leaving children-of-colour with no role models other than gangsters.
There have also been too many fathers brutally murdered in front of their children to mention. And now the children themselves are being targeted.
Two young siblings – aged eight and one - died in gang crossfire in Gugs recently.
And who can forget the heart-wrenching story of five-year-old Ditebogo Phalane, who ran outside his home in Pretoria to greet his father, when hijackers struck.
Reports imply that the little boy was deliberately shot dead, as the hijackers fled empty-handed.
What has become of us as a society?
Criminals have always been willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals. But there was always a line, with innocent people, women and children on the other side.
That line has been crossed numerous times and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.
dailyvoice@inl.co.za