Stop getting high sniffing the national rainbow
I live next to a generator. Lovely people run that rumbling beast. They provide a great restaurant service to people on this dreamy point where the surf whomps and the walkways are green and decorated with ocean art.
From my humble lodgings I can glimpse the sea, or sneak a peak over my back gate, the fulfilment of a childhood dream. I am not alone in this deeply habitual East London behaviour.
I’m lower middle class, but insanely privileged to be an oceanator. But it’s hard to keep reminding myself of that when the kettle clicks off and the air is suddenly filled with engine noise and the lung-clenching stink of hydrocarbons.
Do I turn up the radio, (just live with it) as my Gatstad car smouse would say?
Well I do. Here is one of my quirky moments: when Eskom and BCM cut the power at the Daily Dispatch, I quickly peer through the window at the top of the pipe that sticks out from that big boy gennie in the corner of the shade-clothed parking bays.
I wait for it! A little lid at the end of that pipe flips up and then ...hold, hold, thar she blows! A bunch of carboniferous black belches are coughed into the atmosphere.
We may be “load-shedding” to save Eskom and those crooks, but emissions nation-wide continue making us the 12th worst carbon monoxide polluter in the world. We are told that our president is slugging it out in a galactic battle with the fossil fuel mafia over Eskom and must hope that the tortoise will beat the hare, that he can lift that ruthless jackboot from the windpipe of clean energy, solar and wind.
However, politicians come and go, and we are effectively being told to leave our generators to our children in our wills.
I met a man, not in Galilee, but Stirling. He showed me a big black box in his garage the size of two boarding school trommels standing upright. The sun striking solar panels on his roof kept this giant intelligent battery pack pumped with energy.
He proudly informed me his R220,000 alternative energy system was keeping his house, deep freezers, fridges, geysers, everything, going 24-7. He rarely had to flip the
You would be better off buying solar than paying a therapist to try and cope with anger management issues with the stonewalling BCM accounts department
switch to let the Eskom-BCM bandiete back into his life.
But wait, there’s more. This smart man, an educator noggal, had a plan which would see the new power system paying for itself. He has tenants who must buy electricity from him, and this goes some way to paying for the new kit.
Clever né? I wonder why it is that people reach so easily for the gennie solution, in national terms, simply taking over the role of climate criminal from the state, when freedom is literally knocking at your door?
So much argument about why to buy a generator and not a solar system, but I have yet to find someone who crosses over into the new world order of clean, solar energy who complains that it does not do the job to beyond 90%, meaning they have reduced the flow of blood money to a politico-munico vampire to a justifiable trickle known as — nothing for you today, bloodsuckers!
You would be better off buying solar than paying a therapist to try and cope with anger management issues with the stonewalling BCM accounts department.
So what’s more stressful? A life spent cogitating over your electricity bill, or calculating, spending and playing with the cost of ditching that bill for your own system?
People who make the leap, get absolutely turned on by solar power. They love watching the counters on the digital panels go up and down, like the painted ponies on the carousel of life, said someone genuinely famous.
I had a long chat with a philosopher, an okie who ran a big SA varsity’s entire department and has scribbled down a few books.
We spoke about why people stayed hooked into gaslighting government networks for so long.
The best philosophers are the one’s able to take complexity and turn it into a public feast of piquant information and learning and his case, a good glass of wine, unfortunately wasted on your Sad Sack columnist who relishes but one glass-and-a-half of vino, or two beers and that’s it.
So, the philosopher speaks of the horrible “abyss” that calls and tends to seduce him “given the levels of violent corruption — “youngsters stealing grants from grannies to the plundering of the state ” .
But it is too easy for everyone to fall back into old racist thinking.
That is the easy (fake) way out. Instead he spoke of other ways which “are more difficult alternatives, which do require a different kind of commitment to the SA intellectual project, the political project and the historical project. It is a different commitment altogether”.
We all need to accept that “the story of SA exceptionalism has come to an end. A lot of the disappointment people are grappling with as they try to make sense of this dysfunctional state is the promise is that we were going to be different, we were not going to be yet another African basket case”.
But most postcolonial African states, for complex reasons, ended up with liberaldemocratic constitutions which prioritised individual rights “which have nothing to say to African people, who are essentially communitarian (where the community moulds the individual), it’s about looking after your community, your clan, family relationships. These take priority over everything else including the public good and one’s responsibility to the law. There is a fundamental tension we were never going to escape because we were high on sniffing rainbows”.
“So often when I teeter on the edge of nihilism (all culture, morals, life is meaningless) what pulls me back is the idea that we were never going to be the exception. We are finally seeing ourselves living among two regimes, a democratic state vs a communitarian regime. In this, we are the same as every other postcolonial African state which has had to recognise that at some point the two regimes are at some level fundamentally incompatible.
“My life has become quite small. If there is a nihilism it is that of party politics. There are many who feel participation in party politics is pointless, I am going to show a different kind of commitment to a different kind of politics. Real political change is not going to be brought about by parties although they will always have money and promises and the disillusionment that goes along with party politics.
“The real stuff will come from mowing the verges, picking up the rubbish. I do that every day when I walk the dogs. I drive around with a plastic bag in my boot and afterwards I put on my gloves and pick up other people’s s**t, literally, plus coke bottles, beer bottles, nappies.”
Another problem is that there are people who have no culture of community projects, no experience or clue of what it means to participate in a community project.
“Everybody wants to be left alone in their world and expects the state to do what it is supposed to do with our taxes, but when the state fails to do so, we somehow just don’t have it in our cultural genetic code, to act, other than forming buurtwagte and running around looking for tsotsis.”
We rarely get around to fixing the potholes or restoring derelict public centres.
“We don’t have the history, beyond that of individual action, of thinking about these problems in cultural community terms.”
There are some out there doing it, “but the point of the exercise is to hook up with other people, stand together and do something to make it better”.
We need to build that into “our blood, our cultural genes”.
“So I look after my property, and I have my little individual civic duty projects.”
The question is: when last did you attend a civic meeting of your local community?