We are not born with fear per se, but a wonderful sense of self preservation.
Fear is a learned response to our own experiences, or by being educated by those with experience.
To support this I am pretty sure that there are not many people who would wittingly place their open palm on a stove plate that has been heating up on max for 10 minutes. It is illogical and self destructive to ignore this basic rule of self preservation.
This got me to thinking about what happened at Marikana. Quite obviously the miners believed they would be relatively safe running amok. They after all had the assurance from their muti….from their leaders….and from the misguided belief that only apartheid era governments would be capable of quelling their uprising. How very wrong they were !
Ok, so how do we get the populace to understand that insurrection, criminality, dis-establishmentarianism are undesrirable options, and quite simply, that respect for law and order must be foremost in each of our minds and lives, each and every day.
Although detractors will scream blue murder that even a hint of corporal type consequences is undesirable, let us not forget that self preservation is accomplished through fear of consequences.
Re-intoducing the sjambok to law enforcement may just be the right thing to put an end to the violence and destruction we are seeing almost on a daily basis. Of course law enforcement practitioners themselves must also be subjected to extremely strict and rigorous ‘rules of engagement’to prevent abuse.
Now who said they had the keys to that SAPS warehouse where all the ‘peacemakers’ are stored ?
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