In honour of Hillary Gardee – a mother failed by her democratic society
Desensitise: “make less likely to feel shock or distress at scenes of cruelty or suffering, by overexposure to such images; free from a phobia or neurosis by gradually exposing them to the thing that is feared”.
As a young mother, she was buried on Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day. She had chosen to adopt a baby girl, who called her Mommy. This is something unusual and unheard of, for a single woman her age to adopt a child and take responsibility for bringing the child up.When the three-year-old child was found she said, “Mommy is fighting”.
In the introduction to the book, Chomsky talks about “the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy”, in as far as the American system of democracy, in particular, has been presented as the best in the world, whereas, on the contrary, the very “American system is coming to have some of the features of failed states”.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who, in 1994, was the chairperson of the Constitutional Assembly that had been tasked with the mandate of drafting a new constitution for the country, wrote the foreword of a book called One Law, One Nation: The Making of the South African Constitution, by Lauren Segal and Sharon Cort. He mentions ANC struggle stalwarts Joe Slovo, Walter Sisulu, OR Tambo and Nelson Mandela, on whose shoulders he said they were standing.
Unfortunately this is not what Gardee and countless other victims of violence and crime in our country can say. Women and children live in fear for their lives. Their rights are violated every day. The Constitution is no shield for them.