Have you ever received an invitation for an article writing competition and you are so excited, but you realise you will not be able to meet the wording requisite as yours can be summarised in simply two words?
guest column: Nothando Bhila
This was my plight when I realised my two word essay was simply “Family Integration” for the paper on disarmament.
Disarmament is the act of reducing, limiting, or abolishing weapons.
Disarmament generally refers to a country’s military or specific type of weaponry.
Disarmament is often taken to mean total elimination of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), such as nuclear arms.
General and complete disarmament was defined by the United Nations General Assembly as the elimination of all WMD, coupled with the “balanced reduction of armed forces and conventional armaments, based on the principle of undiminished security of the parties with a view to promoting or enhancing stability at a lower military level, taking into account the need of all States to protect their security”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmament.
A WMD is a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological or other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans or cause great damage to human-made structures (for example, buildings), natural structures (such as mountains), or the biosphere.
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The scope and usage of the term has evolved and been disputed, often more politically than technically.
Originally coined in reference to aerial bombing with chemical explosives during World War II, it has later come to refer to large-scale weaponry of other technologies, such as chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction.
At hand, most of the WMDs being used across the world for different types of wars whether they be border, inter-State or intra-State, have no regard for those not directly participating.
The term family has become extremely relative in the 21st century so much that in my view to successfully achieve disarmament, we have to go back to the uninfected meaning of family and the roles that family plays in society, the very societies from which nations are formed.
After all, the infinite list of actors that form a nation such as ministers, soldiers, nurses, teachers, thieves, rapists, terrorists, armed robbers all come from families.
As such, if this is the very source of the different people that then come up to form a nation, much consideration should be made to this unit of society called family, or perhaps, the neo-social strata demands such shredding of this unit to enable personal interests to advance?
We have read, heard or seen the increase in shootings around the world of innocent people, religiously motivated, racial or political, but what remains is blameless lives lost and the gunmen are not falling from the sky.
If I may borrow from United States President Donald Trump, “They are not Hollywood actors either”, but these people come from some “family”, however you may decide to define the families they come from and the various backgrounds sometimes blamed as leading to the stimulations of their actions.
Attacks I found extremely disturbing were those administered by juveniles as this is our future generation of leaders and if we do not curb these acts in their infancy, what kind of a world are we breeding?
Research by some scholars has shown that in states with increased gun availability, death rates from gunshots for children were higher than in states with less availability.
The vast majority of accidental firearms deaths among children are related to child access to firearms, either self- inflicted or at the hands of another child.
States with child access prevention laws have a lower rate of unintentional death than States without such laws, https://injury.research.chop.edu/violence-prevention-initiative/types-violence-involving-youth/.
Ultimately, my proposal is, with all the “rights” we now have under the sun, can the world system embrace all these rights under the umbrella of family too so that we do away with outright creation of sub-units within the unit by extracting members of the unit and yet idyllically these work hand in glove and way better than individualism.
Indeed, there are several inequalities that are a bone of contention that were long suffered and I totally agree in redressing these in as much as I am strongly of the idea of strengthening the entire family unit while we resolve the pending concerns so that we may move together like animals do as herds, not out of fear, but more for the feeling of “being together” peacefully.
Nothando Bhila writes in her personal capacity
