PISTORIUS KILL AND THE HUMAN VULTURE

Dear Vultures,

         I’m not referring to those majestic birds with a huge wingspan that spend their lives cleaning up the veldt when elephant and other animals meet their maker.

         I’m addressing the entire human race.

         We have made tremendous strides in technology and other fields but we are nowhere near eradicating the vulture in all of us. And to make matters worse the human vulture is not driven by hunger to enable it to live, but by a ghoulish desire just to be at every kill possible.

WAITING FOR THE TRIAL

         Nothing interests us more than one of our own being killed, mutilated or obliterated. A roadside accident will draw a huge crowd in a flash. It’s the flow of red that sustains us.

         We revel in the bad, the gory and the macabre. The news media wouldn’t last a day with TV channels or papers that only gave us good stories and left out the bloody details that we all crave.

         Now, much like the flying vulture that can see for miles, social media has ensured the human type can be on the kill quicker than ever before.

LOOKING FOR ANOTHER BODY

         It, together with the other forms of media, enables us to get the feeling that we are actually on the body in amongst the horrific entrails, no matter where we happen to be throughout the world.

         God it’s thrilling, the whole experience makes me tremble with excitement.

         Better still we are now able to summon other vultures at the press of a button or the touch of a screen. There’s nothing like the feeling or the publicity you get from being first on the kill.

         Best of all are the ones involving high profile personalities like Oscar Pistorius.

IN HAPPIER TIMES

         That’s when our blood lust shoots off the scale. Just like the vultures in the wild we fly in from all over the place. And for those of us who can’t physically get there the media will ensure that we can feast on even the tiniest scrap of bloody meat.

JONATHAN JANSEN Rector of the University of the Free State
who described the Pistorius trial as an unholy obsession
about a man without legs

         You can’t do better than the way Sky News has been titillating our appetite for the trial with this juicy morsel. And what’s more it’s their exclusive.

         It’s footage of Oscar at a shooting range some time ago using the very same pistol he used to kill his girl friend, model Reeva Steenkamp. And this will be repeated ad nauseum for days just in case anybody around the world missed it the first time.

         I can’t wait to watch the shot by shot account of his trial. It doesn’t concern me in the least that the parents, other relatives and friends of Reeva’s will be reliving the agony of the day they heard that she had died, alone in a toilet.

REEVA'S PARENTS - DOES ANYONE CARE ABOUT THEM?

         All I’m interest in is satisfying my insatiable lust for all the circumstances surrounding a grisly, gruesome death, even down to the minute details like Oscar’s favourite food at the age of five.

         In the Pistorius case only one person has died, but we still smell the blood of two. We are jostling and Tweeting away at this feast that will only sustain us momentarily, until the next one comes along.

         Then we’ll be off to pick the bones clean from the carcass of some other human vulture, because unlike the ones in the wild we are cannibals on a grand scale.

         The most disturbing aspect of all is that we are tremendous hypocrites who still consider ourselves civilized.

         Yours depressingly,

         Jon, a spokesman for all wild vultures that are so outraged at the way the human ones are dragging their name into the gutter.

Buy my book "Where have all the children gone?" on Amazon.com  It's a thriller with an underlying love story.