I cannot believe it we are about to be up all night for Kaley’s birthday.  I’m barely holding my eyes open like some comedians do when they are imitating George bush, only they can stop doing this and I can’t.  Our friends Jerry and Linda met us at thet airport now we are tightly locked up in our compound.  Razor wire, electric fences, 24 hour guards, general insecurity is everywhere.  The state is so incapable of keeping its citizens safe and the South Africans are acutely conscious of this.  A Sunday morning Times article today is entitled “State Losing Legitimacy as it Fails to Protect Citizens from Crime.”  Our friend told us that the prisons have been emptied out and the prisoners have all taken positions in the government which is thoroughly corrupt.  He told us that today’s paper has an article in which a high ranking official used $800,000 of the public’s money to fly his or her family out of the country for a private party.  It wasn’t much of scandal.  The government still paid for it, the secretary is still in office and life continues on simply running business as usual.  The white police chief of Petermaritzberg was a former revolutionary who participated in insurrections and is known to have planted a bomb.  This act he justifies as necessary for the cause.  It is so impossible to imagine an American politician with a  future after having planted a bomb.  Signs of radically escalating crime and insecurity are everywhere and one wonders how long a modern country can continue to function under such a strain.

    Ordinary houses have huge walls, then razor wire and electric fencing, then guard dogs.  When the burglar is lucky enough to make it past all of this, homeowners carry guns.  Their strategy shoot the intruder, then shoot the ceiling so that you can tell the police that you fired a warning shot.