Shooting from the lip

criminals. “That answer wasn’t good enough for Mockus.”

Instead, the mayor spent two terms in office trying to convince his constituents that every life had value.

In 2012, more than 30 percent of the world’s homicides took place in Central and South America despite the fact 8 percent of the world’s population lives there.

“These astonishing numbers can be attributed to a variety of factors including the presence of gangs and organised crime, economic inequality, easy access to firearms, weak law enforcement, and an ineffectual judiciary.

“But they are also a result of a public that has become desensitised to murder, especially when it occurs among young, low-income, marginalised people of colour.

“One way to ‘denormalise’ homicide is to make it harder for people to ignore. Toward that end, we support a new section of the Colombian news site La Silla Vacia, which reports on every homicide in a single Bogotá neighbourhood.

“For too many people, violence and insecurity are seen as chronic conditions that cannot be changed.

“Only when citizens feel, as Mockus says… that even one person killed is too many, can we begin to create more open and safe societies throughout Latin America,” the foundation wrote.

The danger here may be as grave, and not just about murder.

Certain leaders’ public defiance of our constitution threatens to “normalise” such behaviour, among 50-something-million South Africans.

But we still have a choice: To mimic marauding “masters” – or relentlessly recommit to our own values.

And our essential enabler could be: these newspaper pages – media which is open to all, relevant to many, trusted and fiercely defended.

A space in which we show and tell each other why we choose to live our lives in the way we do.

“News” is the public negotiation of our common purpose as ordinary South Africans.

Our conversations with ourselves, our agreement on what is “normal”, defines who we are.

And what we deem acceptable. Or not.