CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Violence can never be justified, even when you take the greatest offence
'Is it enough of a red rag to warrant violent, destructive behaviour? Is anything?'
I come from a family where violence was so abhorred that we looked with contempt at parents (and aunts and uncles and teachers and strangers and children and adults in general) who admonished bad behaviour with physical brutality. Hitting was out. Savagery, my lovely dad called having to resort to violence to express anger or make a point or simply lord one’s power over another.We certainly did not have the politically correct vocabulary that is fashionable today (language and terminology that often, I have to say, I hear with distaste). My lovely dad and my neurotic mother never once said to us Naidoo siblings: Use your words not your fists. Or: Tell Shaun or Anton or Antonette how you FEEL. Tell them how what they’ve said or done has hurt your feelings. Aaaaagh. Still, I have to concede that it’s an extremely useful tool that would have benefitted us as children. Not that it was entirely necessary in the community we lived in where corporal punishment was frowned upon. Indian fami...
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