O
VER the almost six years that I have been writing this column, about 80% of the e-mails, tweets and Facebook messages directed at me have had one thing in common: sheer amazement at my ability to maintain a “sunny disposition” in the sea of negativity, unhappiness and misery all around us.
I hardly ever offer an answer to this, mostly because in my everyday life I am one of the most miserable bastards you’re ever likely to encounter. I’m generally grumpier than ole Gwede Mantashe answering stupid questions at a Luthuli House press conference. So I go out of my way to not spread the misery. The way I figure, any time I’m in a bad mood it’s my own fault, so I expend more energy negotiating the anger minefield that is our reality than a doctor without borders expends to avoid Ebola.
In recent months, I have been quietly but dramatically decreasing the amount of time I spend logged on to social media. Logging on to Facebook or Twitter in the morning is like opening a fury tap. A wave of smouldering hatred so forceful it knocks you down backwards is what will greet you.
I’m absolutely convinced that most South Africans don’t sleep at night. No. They just wait for eight hours until everyone else is awake so they can look in the mirror and go, “Okay Susie, what is going to piss us off today?” By the time they log on to Twitter at 8.30am they are livid because they heard on the news that students at the University of Cape Town have deposited a clod of peanut butter on Cecil John Rhodes’s statue.
The other day I heard some caller on 702 register her disapproval at the mooted removal of one of Cape Town’s Rhodes statues. Man, was she furious — stark raving mad! I remember thinking, “Why is this woman taking this so personally? Was Rhodes her lover in a former life? Has she been receiving money in the post sent by the statue and now she worries that she won’t be able to afford extra cheese the next time she buys Debonairs pizza?”
And it’s not so much that we’re angry — it’s that we’re angry all the goddamn time! What is going on?
People are writing 2 000-word letters to the editor to bitch about all the desperate, destitute and starving people begging on street corners. “It’s not all right, you know. We can’t have all this loitering that’s going on at the William Nicol on-ramp”. Let me see if I’m getting this straight. People are upset that hungry people are acting all hungry and asking other people for money? Really, South Africa?
Instead of the Hawks wasting our money purchasing knives to plunge into each other’s backs, maybe they need to investigate the source of this anger. I’m certain that Thuli Madonsela would be happy to help out and write a report afterwards that the president will ignore. But at least we’ll know. My own theory is that Clover, Kellogg’s, Woolies, Liqui-Fruit and other breakfast suppliers are colluding to keep us perpetually angry. They need to be hauled in front of some parliamentary committee of overweight MPs to explain what is in our cereal, yoghurt and pre-packed fruit that is making us so angry at 5.45am.
I am the graveyard-shift fellow on PowerFM, from midnight until 3am, and when I started about two years ago I used to take calls from listeners. After about three months I stopped, purely because I was being driven to near suicide by the calls I was receiving.
There was some guy called Sbu who would call me at 1.54am and go on vicious tirades, just absolutely dripping with venom about the ANC, DA, IEC, Eskom, Telkom and pretty much every acronym within our borders. And I’d sit there wondering how it was possible that anyone could be that angry at freaking six minutes to two on a random Tuesday morning.
His anger was so palpable that I could hear the hernia pop out of his rear end as he talked about “that” Gupta plane. Look, I also think that Ajay, Atul, Rajesh and our new ambassador to the Netherlands should’ve opted to land their plane at Lanseria, but for the love of biryani and everything that is spicy, why should this make anyone so mad that they forsake nocturnal pleasures with their spouse to rant about it at 1.54am? The distributors of Gaviscon must be making a killing in this country.
In one of my rare appearances on Twitter in recent times, I tweeted: “Just discovered that the premier of the Northern Cape is one Sylvia Lucas. Never heard that name before. I really need to pay attention.” Innocuous tweet, right? Oh, how wrong you are. Within an hour someone had tweeted back to berate me for being “so self-absorbed and out of touch”.
My response was to go into a cold rage and pen this 900-word response. I’m truly South African after all. LS