It is difficult to sympathise with the spiteful

And, it's that time of the year again - where riotous students go on a rampage: burning tables, bullying fellow students, ransacking venues, littering the campuses with garbage, and singing struggle songs to the stamping of their feet...oh joy.

This is probably the only aspect of campus that I do NOT miss. Not even in the least (if you recall my blog-post of August last year, "Never let a pot-plant fall into the wrong hands"). I'm not there this year to join in the hoards of students who, grabbing only the bare essentials, flee from the advancing army of hooligans (or in my case, allow themselves to be pulled along by worried contemporaries), but I hear it's all just as frustratingly imbecilic and mutinous as the years past. And so, I am indignant and disgusted on behalf of all the students who still have to deal with these ruffians.

Their plight may, in some cases, be an important one and I actually might have sympathised with them too, if they didn't go about creating such chaos in their wake with no regard for others. Do they not realise that the funds they seek, will now have to go into restoring the property that they themselves have damaged? Do they not realise that they are the ones sabotaging their own efforts?

It's pathetic; it's idiotic; it's immature; it's selfish - to describe it in just a few choice words. It proves not only to the world, but to us as South Africans, how fragile, and young and so precarious is our little democracy...how immature it is. In the great scheme of things, these campus riots don't appear to be even remotely equal to matters of state...but think about this: these hooligans may very well be our leaders of tomorrow. I mean, everyone laughed at Zuma...and look where he is now.

Which is, in truth, a rather scary notion. A sad one too, considering all the effort that their predecessors, and our much respected leaders of past, put into gaining freedom for our country. I find it insulting to all the great men and women who once sang the very same songs that these rioters bandy about in their ignorant disorder. How dare they take implements of the Freedom Struggle and abuse them in such an indecorous manner! How dare they now abuse the freedom that they have been handed on a silver platter! How dare they prove all the dictators and past, ignoble, leaders who said that we did not deserve this said freedom right!

We, as the next generation South Africans, should be aiding in the growth of our democracy. Not hindering or maligning it, to meet our own selfish ends. There is no need to be violent. There is no need to be abusive. There is no need to be spiteful and hostile. There is no need, to cause destruction.