Looting is a warning shot...

Last week I wanted to buy new slippers – on Sunday night this was my stated Monday morning mission. Yet by the time I decided it was warm enough to leave the house, the malls were looted, aflame or closed down and shuttered in a panic.

Still, I can’t believe I was actually going to spend money on new slippers when I could’ve just walked in and helped myself.

I could’ve left with a whole box of stokies, and a flatscreen TV, but no, I just lazed about drinking tea and reading the newspaper. Like a chop.

Anyway, National Looting Day/s is proof indeed of the old maxim that God helps those who help themselves ... and boy, did everyone help themselves.

It was a frenzy, and the upshot of it was I got cold feet, literally.

But if it was truly about former president Jacob Zuma being imprisoned, there’d have been wars over Estcourt prison, not Eskort bacon.

When I finally made it to Woolworths, it was to panic-buy the mandatory five-litre bottle of water, crisps, milk, bread (only garlic bread remained, but hey-ho) and tonic water, because if this ship is going down, I intend drowning in hoarded gin and tonic.

Given the number of liquor stores looted, many others felt the same.

And yet... and yet... I can make light of it now, but for a moment weren’t we all scared? Didn’t it feel like end days?

We witnessed the worst unrest since 1994, and nobody went untouched.

A friend’s parents in a retirement complex in Kwa-Zulu-Natal were asked to ration, to share with neighbours in need; another only had rice left to eat.

Yet many people in our country grapple with such insecurity every day. Little wonder they joined the looting, because when your world is being torn apart, you’d better grab yourself something before there’s nothing left.

This, then, was a warning shot: people are desperate, and something needs to change. Everything needs to change. That so many locals rallied to protect malls in disadvantaged areas and then went back in their droves to clean up the mess, like a tide in reverse, shows that this is not us, that we want to do better.

And that we have to do better, because now we have glimpsed the alternative.