I'm NOT a criminal... I missed that bus

Don't you just hate it when you're hacking away on your computer, on a roll and then outta the blue the program you were working on just shuts down without saving your work. DAMN!!! that frustrates me. Sometimes I find myself wondering if maybe whatever I was writing wasn't meant to see the light of day... but then being stubborn as I am I just start again and say "fuck the internet gods" for putting me in a position where I have to choose between freedom speech and random gibberish.Lol. We have the net/blogs so that we can express and relay our deepest and most random thoughts without having to choose. Talking about sharing my random two cents... I was in a discussion the other day. More like a social gathering with some friends and my girls colleagues. I happened to mention that I have an aunt who has been rotting in a Chilian prison for the last 15 or so years for drug smuggling. Incidentally, we thought she was dead as she disappeared in the early nineties, without a trace. Most of our family assumed that her husband, who was a Taxiboss at the time, had stuffed her into a barrel of acid and gotten rid of her remains. Her two sons, who are juvenile diliquents, who are wanted in every town of every border in the country swore that they world avenge their mothers death if it was the last thing they did. In 2006 my brother received a letter from Chile, saying that my aunt had been incarcerated there with a life sentence. Anyway, as I relayed this story to an 'all white' audience, I noticed how the looks on their faces changed to a soury disgust, like they couldn't believe that they were sitting just mere feet away from someone who knew an actual criminal. My girl sat back canning herself, having heard this story before and i suppose having had a similar reaction the first time she heard the story.
I don't know about you, but often when I tell people about criminal relatives that I know they always give me these shell-shocked looks. I seems to me that alot of people in our country come from such a moral standing that they assume that the only real criminals are government officials and the murderers they've read about in papers. I started thinking about how many people I know who have turned to crime to better their lives and realized further that in my life I have encountered at least two hand fulls people that I know personally who, reached milestones in their lives where they thought crime would really pay. I concluded that, although the audience of people I spoke to are South Africans of European decent, the morally inclined culture that they grow up under is rarely exposed to real criminal act except for the white colour crime that their distant cousin might suscribe to or that they read about in tabloids.This is Africa (T.I.A) - Many Mzansians, have been raised on the backs of criminal relatives. Our parents in most cases, are God fearing people, who would sooner starve than to commit a crime. But so many of our family members have been tested beyond any reasonable means and the crimes that they are squeezed into. Crime isn't the random inflammatory statements that we hear about on the tellie every night. Our cousins, uncles and neighbours have become what they have become out of the poverty strickeness that infests our sometimes pretentious land. Often we forget who the criminals are. The are children whom we neglected. They are aunts who never got a raise in the twenty years that the devoted to society. They are dads who were cheated out of their pensions. They are friends who we couldn't help because of our own demon days. They have been in and out of prison, and though they realize that crime isn't the way, between the social grant and the starvation, the demoralization, prison seems like a holiday at a game reserve. This is africa and I am not a criminal. My brother is not a criminal. My sister is not a criminal. You.... staring at me with you Maybelline lipstick and your botox twisted are not a criminal, but let the recession turn you into an ugly beast and i might not be able to save you from being as african as the aunt that I once knew.
x
Weird World Chronicles