Violence, grief and evil

Some sobering realities strike you across the face when you’re standing in the hot sun outside the home of two elderly men you know, and their lifeless bodies are lying on the floor inside.

Grief is patterned in a manner that captures regret, anger, and guilt in a single indivisible package.

Spend enough time in the journalism business and you understand its vicarious impacts. Live long enough in a violent country and you know its direct consequences.

Just one day after some celebrated a claim of resurrection we were, first thing the morning after, confronting death.

It is the stuff of macabre design. A juxtaposing of sorrow and celebration followed by more grief. Mervyn would have heard the message at church on Sunday, save for news of a final cruel act in which he would become a key subject.

For certain, there is a theology to cover all of it. But it hardly proposes understanding beyond a claim of pervasive, amorphous "evil."

BC and I discussed this via text messages two days later. Could it be that such a condition resides somewhere in all our souls?

If so, the challenge calls on their excellence, but surpasses the mere competence of lawmakers, police, judge, and jury. There is, perhaps, the application of law and justice both as prevention and as cure.

For certain, our frequently quoted “criminologists” have more than lightly scanned the literature that finds blood on a multitude of different hands and circumstances. Yet, “crime” is polled as election and political concern, paraded as feedstock on the hustings, and displayed as trite partisan and even ethnic one-upmanship.

“Justice”, we may consider, is both condition and process. Something that applies as much to pre-condition as it does to outcome. Hence, “social justice” – not as slogan or fashionable rhetorical posture – but as lived reality to stem oncoming tides of “evil” and to attend to them when they appear.

So, the reporter turns to me as we stood outside the house of death. “What,” he asks sincerely, “do you think accounts for all of this?”

Two years ago, it would have been futile to turn to a confluence of science and politics. But, today, the answer flows like vaccine through a needle: “The first thing we need to do is to disaggregate the experience. Chop it into bits and pieces and examine each one for clues and answers.”

Murder comes in different forms and under different circumstances. So does justice, with policing somewhere in-between to mediate the application of law. So, where is there a straight answer to all of this?

For starters, police commissioners, ministers of national security, parliaments and the people who occupy seats there are almost irrelevant to some of the more urgent tasks at hand.

It is true that appalling crime detection rates, sluggish judicial action, and sloppy lawmaking have done their share of damage. But isn’t there something in all this that points to civic responsibility and the value of social institutions?

I told the reporter last week it could not be expected that a police officer be assigned to every one of us every hour of every day. There is no judge next door to mediate disputes. There is no law or constitution that physically prevents me from taking your property or from hating you.

I remember once exploring prospects for a version of “broken windows theory” that embraces an expanded role for the citizenry. What some old-stagers identify as the “village” dynamic that places the onus not for vigilante justice, but for social responsibility in the hands of our communities.

There are experts in this sort of thing whose voices we are not hearing. The usual suspects make the media rounds and that’s that. I don’t claim to have any answers, but I think I understand the questions.

Maybe there are muted admonitions in the churches, mosques and mandirs, at the universities, service organisations, and even within the political parties, from which there has been very little of any value on this point.

Whatever the case, violence abounds. These issues should not await hot mornings outside houses of death to occur to us. Recent years have also proven beyond all reasonable doubt that we are not going to vote, press release, shout, march, or social media our way out of this.